Well, first I have to say that project A got waaaay off track.

Problems?

1. It’s a bad time of year. I always think that the fall is easier, because I don’t have my robot team active until after Christmas, but among the school things that have been going on…

  • Budget time – review current budget and propose next year’s budget, which in light of current economic conditions this year entailed identifying areas that can be cut while still working to provide good educational opportunities for students…that took more work than usual.
  • Course development- in the fall, we review curriculum and make proposals for new courses or course changes. This year, we are proposing a major shift in computer courses for the school. Every course, starting next year, will contain a significant programming component. That means we are cutting classes like digital video. We will keep the flash animation class, but add more focus on the use of Actionscript; we will keep the web development course, but put more emphasis on things like javascript. The Game Programming class has been taught in Flash, using Actionscript, but since the regular Flash class will teach more of that, the Game Programming class will now be taught with Python. and  so on. This process of investigation, decision, realignment, and write-up has taken a significant amount of time. We also negotiated the addition of a Middle School computer class, which was much needed, but again, took time to propose, work out, and plan.
  • STEM – my school has formed a new STEM initiative, and I am on the committee. It’s great stuff but I am now adding that on to the tech committee, the curriculum committee, and department chair meetings. A lot of non-teaching stuff.

2. Using Camtasia to make the instructional videos for the teachers was harder than I expected. The interface wasn’t bad. One of the hardest parts was planning out each move on the computer so that I did a good job of illustrating the process. And I found out that when I tried to record the right moves PLUS not mess up the narration part, it was more than I could effectively do together. Kinda like walking and chewinggum, I guess. So I decided to record the audio on Audacity, which wasn’t hard, but then I had the problem of syncing up the imported audio with the video. None of it was extremely hard, just more time consuming than I expected.
3. In order to get things moving quickly, I posted the first materials before the Camtasia screen capture parts were done. And since those videos took longer than expected to make, there was too much delay between the first part and the second part. That lost some of the momentum of the project, and probably lost a few teachers as well that started, but then got involved in different things before the next set of materials were posted.
4. Getting started on Project B. Every time I was crunched for time, it seemed that I needed to prioritize the group work, since others were depending on me to complete my part of that. And that was a big project….major time commitment.
5. This is the first time I have tried to take two graduate classes while also teaching. I never felt like I was caught up in either of them. It was a challenge!!!
6. Alice. We taught a two-week course in programming to sixth graders and to 8th graders. That got scheduled for the fall. We decided to use Alice. Since none of the people involved had ever used Alice before, and since I am the most experienced at programming, it fell to me to develop the unit, and to be the lead teacher for it. Those weeks were harried. And the time necessary to learn Alice and plan the unit was pretty major. The good news is that it was a success. We have had kids very excited– even going home to tell their parents about the cool thing they were doing in school! Yea! Kids excited about programming!

Good things?

  1. The Camtasia materials, when finished, turned out well. They are clear and easy for a novice computer user to follow.
  2. The decision to deploy this through the email client made it easy to post materials and easy for teachers to access them.
  3. The teachers who responded were representative of our target audience. There was a self-selection process. It seems that the materials clearly communicated who they were for, and who would most benefit from them.
  4. The client – the school’s ed-tech person was pleased with what we did, and I think, would like to do more projects like this. The asynchronous nature of them could serve our teacher population well.
  5. I learned a lot. Knowing what I know now, I would have proposed something different for the first project. Something I needed to do for school, or something that actually had a teacher, so all materials didn’t need to be developed as totally independent, therefore more detailed, activities.

All in all, it’s been a challenge, but I learned a lot by going through this process!