Week 6 Final Preparation

This week the blossoms for the final project began to set fruit. To continue the metaphor, my ideas have begun to germinate and extend beyond the initial seed. I'm excited that my project will fill a niche in our English reading curriculum and that my colleagues are enthusiastic about pursuing at least a rendition of this idea. In order to stretch myself, I explored the VideoPaper project and even began the outline of my final project there, yet I was concerned about lingering "known issues" even though the page is dated 2005. Thus, I decided it was time to develop the project differently. Knowing that I had at least one Animoto and one slideshow to embed, I decided to go with a wiki. In fact, the slideshow that I used is found on AuthorStream and I corresponded with the creator this week to make sure that I had permission to use her presentation.

I've used Wikispaces before, but learned a few new things as I worked on this. For one, I learned how to re-order my navigation page. Thank goodness for a rainy day! If you're wondering how to do so, click here. Fortunately, my presentations and videos embedded properly and I my sense of how to organize the final project continues to gel. In fact, I've decided that I'll probably write a paper in Word in conjunction with my wiki, because I plan to use the wiki, but might need the paper to fill in the gaps to meet the criteria of the rubric. My work-in-progress is here, but please don't post to its discussion board, because I'm still working on it. Plus, I finally figured out how to change the logo and added a picture of a teenager reading outside.

Meanwhile, as noted on the discussion board, I need to remember to have students self-reflect and provide surveys so that I can guide instruction/learning more effectively. To that end, I created this survey in SurveyMonkey. Since we've found in the past that students have a tenuous grasp on theme and character development, I decided to create a pre-assessment to figure out what they knew and didn't know. That link for my pre-course survey can be found here.

Finally, I received news that the grant for our book club books was awarded this past week and that the presentation of a colleague and I was accepted by the Illinois School Library Media Specialists Association. Not only that, but I canned 9 quarts of pickles and 6 more pints of raspberry jam from the garden. It's been a productive week. Now if I can continue this "flow" for the next couple of weeks, I'll be truly exhilarated. Set the sails!