Friday, October 23, 2009

Friday

After my morning crossing guard job, I took our pyromaniac student to class (see the previous post on that one).

I dropped off a backpack that a parent had brought for a student who had left it had home.

I had 2 - 4th grade classes back to back, each on researching online, however two very different styles. I was only able to cover a very small part of what the students need to understand about the internet and how you search on the internet. I used the tablet (finally) so I could walk around the class and still control the computer.

The second 4th grade class, the teacher did the instruction and it was very quick, very brief but only covered a few points on how to search and what to search.

Our tech from the District IT dept. came and we got the A/V and VGA working in the back of the lab.

We also got the morning announcement system working. All of this in 15 minutes before the music class began.

The music class went well, we talked about how we would define music to an alien, we put the kids in two groups to come up with and write down all of the places we hear music, and then I was able to do the video demonstration I made Tuesday night of the different music set to the same video clip. All of it went well, but the impact of the different types of music to a movie was really made a big impact.

Next was 5th grade, but in between, I heard from the tech that the printer in a 3rd grade class wasn't working because there were network issues with the ports in the classrooms. I'm glad I had the tech check it!

By the time 5th grade came in, I received an email from a former staff member who now works at the District office and asked for copies of the dvd's I made of some professional development that occurred last school year. I began the task of copying the dvd's - in whole onto my laptop, so they could be duplicated. This is one of the wonderful things about owning a Mac, this is something not easily done on a Windows machine unless you have dual drives, and even then sometimes the software will not work as you want it to. With a Mac, it's all very simple and everything works as it should.

I sat and had lunch in the lounge and visited with co-workers which was really nice. It's a nice way to relax and visit outside of the stress in the classrooms.

I went back to the lab to continue with the copying onto my laptop. It was taking about 30 - 45 minutes for each one, and there were four to do. By the time I finished with the third, I tried getting the fourth on, but part of the way into it, I was getting a message that my hard drive was almost full. Then I checked to see the size of the files I had already copied and found they were each almost 4 GB each. I stopped copying and began the process of burning onto dvd the 3 I had already done.

I had to stop to do my afternoon crossing guard duty.

After returning, I got a call from a 7th grade teacher. The middle school students stay late on most Fridays in order to meet the state's requirements for instructional hours in a school year. The students were staying until 3:30 (by this time it was about 1:45) and because of the professional development that was going on there was a problem with the lesson plans the 7th grade teacher had in mind, so she decided to see if they could come into the lab from 3:00 - 3:30. I didn't think there would be a problem with this as I was thinking we were going to be doing some planning from about 2:00 - 3:00. No such luck. The professional development ended up getting the other teachers hooked in until almost 4:00.

I got an idea and set up the computers for the 7th grade class while still burning dvd's. Again, because of the size of the dvd files, it was taking a while to do this.

Then the person requesting the dvd's came to see if they could pick them up, but I only had one done and it was one they really didn't need. I wish I had known that.

I visited with this friend until the 7th grade class came in, and they left.

I continued with the dvd burning during the 7th grade class and showed off my new laptop I purchased last night while at Office Max. This will be explained in another post.

At 3:30 I had to go back out to do a second round of crossing guard duty for the middle school students.

I continued burning the dvd's, and then copied and burned the final dvd.

I left at 5:15 pm.

I went to Mom's house for a few minutes, but she was busy and I was tired and had a car full of stuff to bring home.

I came home, it was 6:00.