Saturday, August 29, 2009

Week 1 Complete!

It's Saturday afternoon, and I survived Week 1 -- three days with students Wednesday-Friday. The kids have really been terrific. It is so painful knowing the library is a few doors away and won't be staffed as it should be, but I truly believe I will enjoy working with my five classes of students. I must say, though, that it has been exhausting work so far!

Using the Google form I mentioned in the last post to acknowledge the class welcome letter has gone well. Some students were a little confused and turned in the printed form as well as completing the online form and or didn't understand how to complete the online form, but most of them had no trouble.

On Friday, I had the students use the laptops, and I think the students really enjoyed getting their hands on the computers. I reviewed the rules for handling them, then walked them through how to access our school Moodle site and enroll in my Moodle course. Moodle is a protected online enviroment which we will use throughout the year to submit assignments, participate in discussion forums, create glossaries for vocabulary, and other activities. The students' task for the day was to enroll in the Moodle course, take a Photobooth personal photo, rename the photo using a standard naming convention, and upload the photo to Moodle. Not all of the students were able to complete the task in our short, 45-minute periods, but most did.

Then, today, I downloaded the photos from Moodle and inserted them in a table in a Word file to create a photo seating chart. I am not good at remembering names, so I am hoping this chart will help me learn the names more quickly.

Now, I have promised myself a full afternoon and evening of R & R -- a movie and reading! :)

1 comment:

  1. Jane -- this is a wonderful start to your new adventure!! I love the Moddle photo seating chart idea. I think so many teachers would love to use this. Your students are so lucky to have you. 21st century learning at its finest!!

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