<strong>Your Name: </strong>Chris Furuya

<strong>Today's Date:</strong> 2006/11/19

<strong>Day(s) worked or described:</strong> M, W, F
<strong>Total hours for week: </strong>9

<strong>The School: Fuller
</strong>

<strong>Kind of Work:</strong> Teaching PowerPoint, WordPress
<strong>Main Report or Narrative: </strong>

Monday: First real day of work, but nobody had responded about interest in the blogs yet so Mr. Jones put me with a classroom with a teacher interested in blogging and asked that I talk to her about it, and help out in the classroom as I could. I worked with a first grade teacher- I forget her name offhand, I believe it's Cindy Burdette?- who asked that I help facilitate discussion in small group, walk around the room and help first graders sound out various words which they couldn't spell, etc. By the last hour of my work- which was pretty soon, for the kids, since I believe school officially starts at 9:30 and I leave by 11- I was helping the kids type paragraphs about their thanksgiving on the five computers in the classroom, then adding basic powerpoint custom-animations to their projects. The visual reminder about choosing a clip art or google image for traveling, food, and people helped them compose sentences about where they were going, what they would eat, and who they would see, and although nothing about the project was particularly thanksgiving-ish or too complex technilogically, they're first graders, to them it's a big deal.
Wednesday: Mrs. Howell and I worked for about an hour, while I taught her the basics of WordPress. Her site currently looks like <a href="http://fullerblogs.cuip.net/howell/">this</a>. She'll be adding writing prompts to her site, then encouraging students to post their replies so they can be shown off to each other and parents. She seemed more interested that I figure out why her computer was giving her grief, though, so I ran Spybot Search and Destroy, cleaned her disk, defragmented and encouraged her to install a trial version of Norton or McAfee anti-virus.
I noticed while I was doing the sites, though, that the <a href="http://fullerblogs.cuip.net/principal/">principal</a> has a weblog for the school, which is the basic WordPress welcome screen. I have to remember to work with her, too, along with the teachers.

Friday: no response about blogging, so I went back to Mrs. Burdette to work on powerpoint and touch-typing. The touch-typing I realize in retrospect was a bit ambitious, considering these kids learned their alphabets only last year :) , but they're thrilled to take their "My Thanksgiving" writing prompt and turn it into a "video", as the powerpoint with custom animation has become for them. Also, since I'd set up a rule of one sentence per slide, and each slide worked like a page of a book and had to have both text and an illustration, the kids both wrote more and had more focus to their sentences than some of their earlier writing as posted around the room on bulletin boards. The custom animations, after a while, fell into a template- I had an example presentation to teach them what powerpoint is and how you can use it, and everybody wanted to copy the example- but considering how during free drawing they all draw the same things, and in the math and D.O.L I grade before class starts at 9 they look off each others' shoulders, I think that's just an age level thing.