Melissa Weihmayer
2-28-2007
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, 6 hours total
Murray Language Academy
Lab help

In my second week at Murray I was a bit less dependent on Joe Mills and more able to find my own projects as well as my own way around the school. My main tasks were: preparing an excell lesson for two third-grade classes, installing firefox on the library computers, installing printer drivers to the computers in the lab, and helping students in their computer lab class. Tuesday was spent entirely in downloading, both printer drivers and firefox. On Thursday, I spent time with a couple of classes, giving the kids "challenges" in Paint when they seemed distracted or sidetracked. I then met with fourth grade teachers to see about upcoming projects that I can help them with. We decided on a powerpoint project (their students, and one of the two teachers that I worked with, apparently have not done much powerpoint, so we will go over basics with them) based on poetry research projects, happening hopefully by the end of the month (but not during my break!). I will investigate poetry programs on the web and send them links to see if they can use them. I then made a study guide for the excell lesson. Friday was the excell graphing/statistics project with the third graders. They seemed very interested, adapted quickly to the steps with the chart wizard, but were very hindered (and quickly frustrated) by their typing abilities, often trying to get me to do the typing for them. Joe said that the instant gratification of the chart wizard option is what makes excell accessible for the kids. The success of the project was particularly satisfying, and I am looking forward to doing it again for another class next week.