Well, you can see by the time that I have been working like a crazy person. I'm as tired as the two dogs in the picture. By the way, you have already met Georgie (black and white dog), but Pearl is her adopted sister. Pearl came from the Chicago English Bulldog Rescue. She was almost dead when Barbara got her. She was about 12 pounds underweight, had mange, skin infections pussing everywhere, ear infections, eye infections, paw sores, etc. As you can tell from the picture, Pearl is now very healthy (and beefy). But enough of that. (I do need some real grandchildren, don't I.)

I finished my last lesson. Yeah!!!!! I feel as though I put together some good stuff (probably not as good as Chris and Deb could have done, but good anyway). I'm excited to share on Tuesday. I spent a bulk of my time putting together guided reading questions to go along with five video segments. My remedial reading kids need listening skills as well as content information, so I created questions for them to answer as they watched the video clips. It may not sound like a big deal to some of you, but I am not kidding when I tell you that my students have serious listening problems. Many of them are ADD or ADHD, so having them listen to these clips and follow along will be a challenge. I tell them in the directions that they can go back and re-listen to the clip if they need to. The clips are all high-interest, so I think this will be successful. I will know more on Monday about all this because I am going to try a different lesson with my students then. I am going to be doing clips on date abuse (NOT abuse of fruit). I have the LCD projector already in my room, and I am going to stream the clip because it worked well on Friday after school when I ran a test on the whole procedure. Both of the two lessons that I have referred to come with teachers' guides through Discovery Education. I will be using some of the materials for the lesson on Monday. Like I said, all of this can look good to me, but the test will be whether or not the kids get into it. Stay tuned, and Tuesday I will tell you.

Enjoy tomorrow. Monday is coming way too soon.

Stressed Out!!

Liz and I just spent an hour trying to become a DEN member and we were unsuccessful. We watched a very short video, but there was no prompt to take a quiz. Could someone please advise us?

Wow...I did it!

I just got into my cuddly, cozy robe, am sipping a mug of hot tomato soup, and am waiting for the plows to come again just because they will since I'm in my robe already!! (Wasn't THAT a well-constructed sentence!?!)

I was excited today to get my second lesson into the computer - I was the one with the old computer at home that took 50 minutes to process page one of Assignment Builder - and it was still running! Luckily I was able to print all the stuff I had entered, so I could re-enter it tonight, and I was successful at getting in my images, video clip, and - ta da! - URLs!! (This is a big accomplishment for someone like me who borders on techno-idiocy!) And when I checked it, it actually all showed up, so I am happy (until the plows come).

Maybe someday I'll have the opportunity to fully utilize some of this great stuff, but as a building sub, I don't get that chance unless I'm long-terming for someone, which building subs are seldom allowed to do. I did, however, get to do just that first quarter, and had three awesome accelerated English 10 and two speech classes. The lesson I will present next week will incorporate some of the things I did with my sophomores, so who know? Maybe I'll have another chance to do it again someday.

See you all next week, and happy shoveling!

Additional Materials

Hello,

I have played with adding a few extras to my assignments. For example, I wanted my students to view the writing project attached to persuasive writing. I created a writing prompt and copied/pasted a word document into the information spot. Then I attached that writing prompt to my assignment. Of course, a hard copy would also be provided. For now, this is a view only piece of the assignment. But you certainly could have the students write a response from here.

Adding websites is also an easy job. Find the website that connects to your content. Copy/paste the address from the site to the “Add Materials” tab of your assignment. (It’s the box with the “http://” already in it.) Don't forget to click the "Add" box. (I forgot that twice, and wondered what was happening, but it was only stupidity--what a relief.)

It helps if you have a few windows or tabs open in Explorer; then you can flip back and forth between sites and your digital streaming assignment.

Good luck. I’m looking forward to seeing all the useful videos people found in our next class.

Day Three

Ugh! The frustration is mounting. It's been a frustrating evening as I worked to complete my final lesson plan only to discover that my video would not download and that the websites I wanted were moving to slow to add. Luckily I have internet at home and can complete the process at home.

The information about what is available to members of the DEN and STAR are intriguing. I am looking forward to an opportunity to dig a little deeper into all that there is to offer. I hope that the blogging opportunities pique my interest as I love to learn in this format. It allows me to capture an idea and run with it knowing that there is a support system if I need it.

I am anxious to hear everyone's lessons as we move into next week as there is so much out there it could take forever to explore it all.

Getting More Familiar

I spent a lot of time this past week working on the three lesson assignments. I can certainly see how I would now use this especially with my health classes. In addition to whole class time at our school, we also have something called permanent mods where I meet with all of my Health students on a weekly basis, but in smaller segments of the class (i.e. generally no more than 10 students at a time). Since Health is a one-semester course, and I will be getting all new students at the start of the second semester, I am excited about using these types of assignments like we are working for this class, during these permanent mods. It will give students the opportunity to work independently on what I would consider to be more meaningful assignments. Even if I just start out by giving them various streaming videos to watch on their own during this time along with building other activities around the videos, I feel I have really improved in offering some new course content.

Here It Goes, Second Assignment

I think this assignment should go a lot better than last time. The assignments and the students will be better prepared.

I wish we could get timeliner! It looks awesome and does exactly what I want to do, it even works with discovery site!

All these resources are great. Thank you for sharing all these resources.

Paul Welch (Lorraine Place)