Happy Vacation - How cool is this?

Hope everyone is feeling rested, I totally have snow on my mind. I found this site, which I think is super cool http://snowflakes.barkleyus.com/. Check it out! Not sure how I can use it at school, but I'll think about it!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

I hope everyone is having a wonderful vacation. Happy Holidays!

Computer Woes 2

Kelly Baird our Tech person from the Zone…region..whatever it is we have now..is working with me to update the memory of the chips in my computers. Things are looking up.

happy new year

Happy New Year!!! We are back in school and continuing the blogging. Our team is still working hard, and can't wait for Friday. I am still leasrning how to get pictures here!!!!!

Today is the day all teachers wait for...now we have two weeks off. `I am eager to start the holidays and feel as though I have gotten a lot accomplished. Recently, we had the opportunity to present to our staff information and reflections from the Powering Up Conference. It was well received...and I think we are actually starting to make some headway with consideration for smartboards. We will keep our fingers crossed.
When we return, we will be meeeting again, and hopefully putting more pieces of this puzzle together. I am also hoping that the blog may have a little more meat! :)

The Great Report Card Glitch of 2008-2009 EKTRON POST DATED 12-15-08

This weekend, I had a major meltdown related to technology advancements in this county. I wrote the following notice to the help desk and have YET to receive a response which makes everything all the more stressful. Not to mention that grades are due on Friday and today we have a half-day due to snow with the possibility of being off tomorrow. This whole new gradebook is consuming my attention, thoughts, and entire being at this moment. I decided to blog about this matter as one entry in the hopes that someone else out there may have feedback to any experiences that they have had with our new program. If for no other reason, at least I feel better just by sharing the experience.

Dear Help Desk,

I am trying my best not to panic at this moment, but I am not sure what to do at this point. I have somehow managed to erase ALL of my S.S. grades for the year while trying to copy a homework assignment from reading that was S.S. based into my S.S. Gradebook.

I followed the directions I learned awhile ago and unchecked all docs except the one I wanted. When it first copied, it said there was a conflict with the gradebook and it only copied the assignment and not the scores, so I thought I did something wrong or was rusty. I couldn't recall if it even did copy the grades as well as I haven't had much practice copying assignments. Nevertheless, I returned using the back button and decided to cancel, but accidentally hit a different button. When my gradebook came back up, the empty assignment was all that was left.
I have spent a very long time trying to "search" like a mad woman for my missing grades. I had not entered anything since progress reports in this subject and it still has my average grade at that point in the grade section, yet no assignments to show in the gradebook.

I am unsure as to what to do next and am CC-ing my tech specialist as well on the matter. Should I average in the last few grades with the one at the time of progress reports? Do I have to reenter all of my assignments for the year? If so, that would take FOREVER! I always have many more grades than are required and I don't know what I would do if I had to reenter them.

I was having trouble with the system before as well when entering the rest of my reading grades. It took me hours today to get that section done because even though I clicked save changes, whole assignments or grades wouldn't be there. When it said I was about to log off, I clicked for it not to by saving changes as it suggests. Then, I would try to go to another grade page or column and the screen would flash. At one point when it came back on, I had double to 8 times an assignment in the gradebook. It would either not record the grades at all or rerecord the grades over and over. Once that was finally settled, I moved on to S.S. and have now ended up with an empty gradebook for that whole subject area.

I am so sorry to complain, but I consider myself fairly computer-literate. I have used electronic gradebooks for the past ten of my 11 years, and never had such problems - ever. I am at a loss. Please, please, tell me there is a way to retrieve my S.S. grades. Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter.

Computer Woes...

This week has been the week of trying to get the machines to work. My classroom is equipped with some ancient computers that in of themselves work fine…add a MIDI board and well it is more than either can handle. They shut down completely if the midi board it turned on.

Computer Woes...

This week has been the week of trying to get the machines to work. My classroom is equipped with some ancient computers that in of themselves work fine…add a MIDI board and well it is more than either can handle. They shut down completely if the midi board it turned on.

So, we are navigating through this blog together. We have encountered one problem with one of our team members...so I guess that will give us something to talk about later in our training.
We are all looking forward to figuring all this out...and finding out how it will help us! Wikispace is next. This is all very new!!!!

Today is the last day of school for the break!! We had sparkle day and had a good day. We used United Streaming to watch a video about Kwanza and had the opportunity to watch the Night Before Christmas. I sent in a package to get a credit for the POwering Up conference. The reflection was a powerpoint and we presented to our staff.

First Post

I'm officially a blogger! I'm pretty excited about it. Blogging is something I've considered doing in my private life, but have never gotten around to. I'm looking forward to trying it out as a tool to reflect on my STEP experiences.

Blog here, blog there, bye Google calendar

Blog here, blog there, bye Google calendar

Here I am, back at my home media center after being there at Bonnie Johns (that did not burn down despite the 'get out now' situation of last week.)

I have now gotten over Google calendar. After taking so much time adding my class schedule to my calendar and the two people who were coming the next day to it, I AM DONE WITH IT!!! At first, I saw an email on the day of my visitors' arrival and thought "how cool." Then, for every day of the week, emails were showing up telling me about every class that was to come to the library that day. That added 6-8 emails every day to my ever growing daily email pile! Too much! I can walk over to the door of my room and see who's coming and when. Enough already. Today, I spent about five minutes deleting every class from the calendar. I may use it for personal calendar reminders, but daily schedule, no way.

Shari, my supervisor, shared some inauguration web sites with me, so I passed it on to the staff. I also played around seeing some fabulous education/library media blogs that folks write that were voted on by peers. This is not one of them, but I did see some wonderful ideas. I saw them at home and bookmarked a few as faves.

Last week, I mentioned my goal of notating some cool sites, so here are two:

http://www.ReadKiddoRead.com - Robert Patterson, author of adult novels, has created this site for parnets, students and children's book lovers listing books with different grade levels and interest levels. He has the photo of the cover, a review, links to book sellers (Amazon, B &N, etc) and other reviews of the books are found on the side. Similar titles are listed below. This is one that I will pass on.

http://www.ala.org/greatsites.com -This is just what it says, great sites that the ALA has found that will help with searches for students. They are organized by grade level and subject area. Each one is annotated. These are safe sites for children. This is another that I will be passing on.

My other techy thing this week was digital photo documentation of the student teacher/artist in residents. I will also be taking the digital photos and videos made about my project for the Walter's Art Museum and creating a presentation. What kind, I do not know yet. I am working with Regina Stimson on it.

Oh help! I can't find the save part!!!! Oh Dahh...it is at the top, I was looking at the toolbar. Fshewww!

12/9/2008BauernschubMary Beth

STEP...one step at a time...

This years STEP proposes to be a unique year. I am not quite sure what the initial activities have to do with the process nor am I quite sure I like the idea of a blog but I shall do my best. As always I am concerned with the safety and integrity of the children that will be working with us as well as my current ongoing battle with the naturalistic integration of technology into the planning-teaching-learning-reflection paradigm.

The Fundamentals of Font aka The Font Funk! EKTRON POST DATED 12/4/09

NOTE: I am 100% sure that this is not from the 4th of December. I know for sure because it is the one I wrote for the 23rd of January. This was my last Ektron entry and the one I actually saved on Word because I was losing things I typed in from Ektron. I have one more to add that the date is off on as well. The other 3 are not my posts. I am missing 4 total other than the one I am about to post. They are fromDecember 4, 12, 19, and January 9, 16, 2009. I am unsure as to the accuracy of the date of the next one. It says 12/15 according to what Ronlyn sent. I am going to have to add on additional blogs at the end now to meet the set total of 24.

I've decided to write about and share some of the resources I have come across while searching the Internet for links related to our curriculum. One that has truly helped me out recently has been the Zaner-Bloser website: http://www.zaner-bloser.com/educator/products/handwriting/index.aspx?id=4296 . Our principal is very committed to teaching our students to write legibly in print and cursive so that they are able to express their thoughts and respond in writing proficiently with increased speed and hopefully, in more detail as writing will not be as "painstakingly" a task. I have purchased several font cds over the years, and downloaded many online to use to create papers to use during instruction in the cursive and manuscript handwriting. The fonts have always been close to the Zaner-Bloser style we use in the county, but there have been certain differences that always bothered me and caused me to have to white-out and over letters or words. This would often make me feel like just writing the documents myself like in the "old days". While I think that I have decent cursive handwriting, it takes me some time to write documents for the children because I am meticulous in my attempt to form the letters correctly. The style of cursive I learned as a child is quite different than the modern style we teach today. In fact, just a few years ago, Zaner-Bloser changed a few letters once more. Goodbye to the capital Q shaped like a 2, and hello to the O-shaped capital Q. This is one letter I can NEVER seem to get right on the first try! I also like to use the cursive font when typing notes or graphic organizers on the laptop during instruction. The problem is that I am constantly having to remind (or be reminded by) students that the computer is forming a letter “incorrectly” or not as we are being taught to form it. In an effort to avoid having to go through this on a daily basis, I went on yet another quest to find and download or purchase the EXACT Zaner-Bloser font style being currently used. I searched several sites, but always came upon a letter with an added loop or missing tail. The Q was incorrect or the undercurve was off. Finally, I ventured back to the Zaner-Bloser site to see if I could just purchase the entire curriculum on CD, hoping to be able to access the font then. To my great surprise, they currently offer grade-level specific templates that you can type into in cursive or manuscript. The templates are lined appropriately and can even be translated into Spanish!!! I was thrilled at the find and began to type in the week’s poetry lesson template into a blank page. When I got to the point I wanted to print and save, I came to a halt. It is with great disappointment that I realized that I could print, but could not save my work. I was left feeling a little gypped, cheated out of the ability to preserve this masterpiece of cursive perfection! Still, I went ahead and printed a set of 3 copies - one to copy and 2 to file, and continued on to a new blank page to type this week’s spelling words. I guess the saying is true that sometimes, you can’t have it all

Think I have the hang of this now

Think I have the hang of this now.

On the day before we returned to school from Thanksgiving break, I set up my Wiki page. That monkey is off my back. I added a photo from my acting resume for the space. I was surprised to see that may name was still up for Wilde Lake High School's Technology wiki. I interned there in the Fall of 2007. I deleted myself from that list.

On my wiki, I set up my goals. One of them is to use this space as a place to inform myself and others about web sites that I need to be aware of. Today, I wrote down several. I left the list at school. I am at Bonnie Johns after a meeting where we learned some stuff about Google's sites and calendars and a review of Culturegrams from ProQuest.

Google sites are found in Google mail. Our library Region 3, has just set up a site where we can edit content, add comments, and add attachments. It seems to me that this is sort of like a wiki/Blackboard combination. Notes of our meeting and requests for certain information were added today.

Google calendar is a calendar that I can set up to say what is going on in my schedule at school, life, in the world, etc. I can control who sees it by adding the faculty of the school, staff from the county, or even the world!!!

ProQuest Training for Culture Grams was neat. I'll have to write more later, 'cause there may be a fire here.

12/4/2008BauernschubMary Beth

Well actually... my second attempt. My first somehow deleted! Part of the learning process I am sure. I am excited to be a part of the STEP team for a second year, and look forward to improving my technology skills with this process. Wikis, blogs, and podcasting are all new to me. I have read several blogs over the past few years, but have never posted and responded. This is a true test for me!!

I am writing this week. I am still trying to figure out how to manuever this site and what we will be able to do on it. I am wondering how this will be useful for me and in my classroom. My partners in crime are also bloggin with me. It is easier to work as a team.