<strong>Your Name: Erin
</strong>
<strong>Today’s Date:</strong> 2006/12/17
<strong>Day(s) worked or described:</strong> T W
<strong>Total hours for week:</strong> 6
<strong>The School: </strong>Emmett Till
<strong>Kind of Work:</strong> Tech for Project, Project Prep, Project Culmination

<strong>Main Report or Narrative:</strong>
I haven't been at Till for two weeks, but the <a title="Charlotte's Weblog" href="http://blog2.cuip.net/charlotte">Charlotte's Weblog</a> has been seeing quite a bit of use in the meantime. Mrs. Jacobson sent me the following information in an email:

<em><font size="1">It's OK, all the students went on the computer and explored the related sites, they had fun being in charge of their computer time. They laughed and tried out things that they wanted to do. I plan to have them do the same today. They don't have computers at home and this is fun. </font></em>

This is a good indication that the website is doing what it's supposed to. In that spirit, this week I added a few more activities for the students-- mainly a short response prompt like I've seen on lots of other CUIP blogs. The students were able to read a short article and answer a question about it on Thursday, and the variety of their responses was really fascinating. I think that commenting on posts is a perfect balance between cool-techie enough for the kids to be really focused and simple enough that the process doesn't overshadow the product.

The internet connection was pretty shoddy on Tuesday afternoon, so I finished up a project from last year that had just sort of stalled. When McCosh changed its name to Emmett Till last spring, all of the students wanted to know what the significance of the switch was. There are very few books suitable for young children on the subject, so one of the first grade teachers, Mrs. Moyenda, wrote an explanatory poem for her students. Her class then wrote some reflective paragraphs in response. Last year I typed up all of these compositions, and now they're organized and printed and waiting to be bound to circulate in the primary library.

Finally, the <a title="Book Previews" href="http://blog.cuip.net/BookPreviews">Book Previews</a> site is alive again! When Mrs. Jacobson showed her afterschool group the project from last year, the kids became very excited about sharing their opinions. Three new students have recorded and been added to the website. Thanks to Mrs. White's own classroom book review project, the recommendations these students gave me were noticeably more sophisticated than many of last year's.