A Month and More...

Its been way too long since my last posting so its time to play catch-up a bit.

Class Blogmeister
It's gone OK so far but there are a some disappointments. Creating and teaching my CG and Web Dev. students went off without a hitch. Some remembered the blog from last year. I started off with a simple assignment to get their feet wet. A new IM device called ZipIt2. With kids IMing at every opportunity, I thought this would be a perfect item to begin blogging with. It even had a interactive website. To make this topic especially useful, I located an audio podcast by Leo Laporte where he describes ZipIt2 and reviews it. A great segway to podcasting and hopefully a good way to create a interesting conversation. We did have a good chat about the product but some students were not as timely posting their opinions to their blogs. So, I tried another posting. This time the topic was something that should have generated a great deal of comments: Our school doesn't provide email accounts and others are being blocked by filters. Why don't students have email access at school and what might be keeping this from happening? Some of the post were excellent while others were below my expectations. I also posted a prompt for students to visit "Windows on Maine", a site hosted by the University of Maine, which provided students (and others) with a tremendous volume of video related to Maine.
Shortly thereafter, two of my Computer Applications classses were introduced to Classblogmeister. They learned the interface, created avitars, and posted articles. It was well recieved and was a nice break from Office XP.
I posted a number of prompts during the Christmas time period. This went quite well as they located a tech "toy" they'd like and I was able to model how to import the image of their choice. This was pretty slick! Overall I was please with the progress.