Day 112

Relative easy day. I like those. They allow me to get more work done here at the school instead of taking it home.

But I'm kind of stuck right now. I've got an extra 2 weeks that I haven't planned for and I was thinking of doing some 3D stuff, but I am no good at it. The kids started Google SketchUp today and it seems to have gone over rather well. Most of them got something done and they are learning the finer points of the program. It looks like I may have to start with some harder videos and tutorials. I went and visited another teacher that I knew had some lessons (built for middle schoolers) and I'm starting from there. It was hard enough for me to figure out how to use it, so hopefully the students will be able to get it a bit faster than I could (which seems to be the case right now). I had a couple as me why I am using freeware stuff when I've got the expensive software here. I asked them do they have the expensive software at home and when they answered no, I said neither did I. I would rather have them use the freeware/open source stuff so they CAN go home and play around with it. I'm sure a few of them do even if they don't want to admit it.

We've been using Flash for the past 3 weeks and now that they've gotten used to using that, I may throw them for a loop and introduce Pencil. It is an open source software for animation. It isn't as user friendly as Flash, but it allows more with traditional hand drawings. I'm still playing around with it, but I think it'll be an interesting thing to finish with. I'm also looking at another open source program called CreaToon. It is animation as well, but I haven't taken a deep look into it.

After the short little lesson in 3D, I think I'm going to start them on Competition Prep stuff. I really want to enter into the MultiMedia Arts Festival. Timpview has done relatively well the past few years and I want to keep that streak going. I have a few students who I am sure are going to enter. They don't get any cash prizes for it, but it is something they can put on their resume.

However, I have been looking at other competitions that my students can enter if they feel like it. One is the Doodle 4 Google competition. If you look on the Google home page their designs around the word Google change throughout the year. Those are called Doodles. They hold a competition for all K-12 students every year to submit their doodles and compete for a chance for it to be seen on the Google homepage. There is also a chance to win scholarship money and money for the school as well as a few other cool prizes. I'm going to see if any of my students are interested. I am afraid to open this up to any other teachers in the school because I don't want all the art kids to take over this. I can only submit 6 entries from the school and I don't want only art kids to do them. I'll open it to my students first, then if there isn't enough interest, we'll see if I talk to the art teacher or not.

As far as the film class is concerned, they aren't doing as well as I had thought. I had 4 of them leave early and when they came in this morning to talk to me why I had dropped off some of their points I asked them why they left and they said that they were bored and there was nothing else they could do in class. I said alright, I can change that. They'll see a different format for things coming tomorrow. I don't know how much they'll like it, but they'll have to live with it until they prove to me that they can budget their time wisely.

Something else that will through them for a loop is the fact that the schedule is changing next week. The school has been going through some flack recently because of all the schedule changes and yet they are changing it again. We used to have an Intervention period right before lunch for 20 minutes in order for the students to go to a teacher and talk to them or get extra help. They have done away with that and instead took away 5 minutes from each class and added a "10-minute intervention" at the end of the period. They say that is for those who need the help at the end of the period instead of trying to do it in the middle of the day. However, I can't use it to continue on with the lesson or to introduce something a bit more complex. It is for those students who need the extra help and instruction of what happened that day. I'm not sure it'll work, but I have to give it a try.

The next couple of days should be interesting. There are PTCs tomorrow (which is always a blast *note the sarcasm*) and then I'm going down to a conference for the weekend. It should be nice to be in warmer temperatures and to get some newer ideas from other teachers. I wish more teachers would be up to giving advice and sharing their resources. It is amazing how many teachers aren't willing to share their lessons or lesson ideas with newer teachers. I actually had one teacher tell me that since he had to make everything up from scratch when he started (which was years and years ago) I had to do the same thing. Uh really?