Chelsea Bingiel

2009/01/09 Week 1
MTWΘ
Hours: 10
The School: Murray
Work: Tech for Project

Project 1:  Athletes site
The kids are working on a project to research African American athletes and create a page using graphics and sound effects with music.  Joe has entrusted me to ensure that they can only browse around to sites that are useful and appropriate, so this project was # fold:
step 1- find 3 information sites for each athlete that give good biographies
step 2- format a webpage to list all athletes that are available for research with bibliography links below
step 3- setup a custom google search for pictures, this ensures there is only free stock photography without scary/inappropriate images
step 4- format a webpage with the link to the google search, as well as searching tips and instructions
For next week, I'll be putting together another search specifically for music and sound effects.  I'm hoping I can convince Joe to let me add remix.overclocked.org to the list, just because I think it would be neat if the kids could play with some video game music!

Project 2:  French flash cards
The Japanese and Spanish sites have had flash cards for a while now, and the French teacher must have got jealous!  So I repeated the process of the other websites:  set up flash card pages, find pictures, get sound files, and change the links for each page.  All the flash card pages are almost exactly the same HTML code, the only differences for each is about 5 fields that take their own file name or text.  However, each teacher has different vocabulary, so the difficult part is finding images that fit in a 325px by 325px box.  This site in particular needed numbers and family members...just try finding a picture of "aunt" or "mother" or "thirteen," it's a little tricky.
The sound files they gave me are quiet.  Between our group, the teachers are sometimes confused about electronics, so they forgot to turn up the microphone volume and check the output before recording.  No matter, I went through and turned up the decibels on each recording (except the french word for aunt saved as aunt.wav....that one I broke in the process, woops).  So, the site should be working!
After setting up the french flash cards, I went through and reorganized the language site.  Now they are more uniform to one another and look a little better, hopefully.

That's about it for projects this week!  I talked with Joe about future projects this quarter.  The issue with me is that I'm productive and manage to get things done in about half the time, woops.  So sometimes I think it might be difficult for him to find me enough projects.  This quarter though, I can go to work from 8:30-11:30 in the morning, so I can work more with teachers and class projects instead of doing purely computer work during near after school after hours.  I'll probably be helping out with their athletes research project, visiting some new teachers and seeing what techie projects they'd like some help on, a variety of things.