Our news show it improving and we have changed from just announcing news and events, having teacher profiles and all that would take about four minutes to bring it to less than three-minutes and have it played during advise. Advise is fifteen minutes every day and as an advisor, for example, I have ten middle grade students. I have the same ones through sixth - eighth grade than in high school they get a new advisor. I have five from last year and five new ones. We used to play DAISlive during fourth block but most teachers never got around to it. I proposed and pushed through to have it played during advise so everyone would see it. With that I am now having tutorials and material that will be discussed during advise. We started with today having a tutorial on setting up Google Sites and for next Tuesday there will be a brief discussion on the purpose of student portfolios which we will be having within the next couple of weeks. We have been putting off student folders for all of last year as we could not get the right way of doing it. Because Google is blocked so much of the time we could not get Sites. After paying a huge fee to have it per year we can get Google, at least at school with a cooperate VPN. At home in Campus Village we have to use our own personal VPN to get anything with Google. If I try to get Google without a VPN, it switches to a porn site in Korean or Chinese and load music plays. I don't know what China's beef with Google is but we have a lot of difficulty. I have written about this in my latest blog at http://neuage.me (morning walk).
We have finally got the license for Power Director 10 and hopefully this next week we will be up and running with it.
Today, Sunday September 02 is impossible to do any work online. Even with running my VPN everything is blocked. I cannot get onto any Google product to read email, work on my sites, interact with others using Google +. I can not get onto Facebook, Twitter, even Bing except for the Chinese version which will not let me translate. Looks like the Chinese government in its incredible paranoia state will not us get past our house online.
To day was yesterday as school days go. I wrote about that in another blog - here - basically we were put off a day like in we have days 1 - 8 cycles in the upper school. Tuesday was a day 1 but as we were home fighting the nonexistent typhoon Day 1 did not happen. I wrote to the head of school and our principal that perhaps we could have two days combined with 8 - 45 minute blocks instead of the 90 minute four blocks but we were told to just advanced the days so that Wednesday became day 1. This threw all our calendars out of whack and for me my Broadcasting class was meeting on Wednesday and Friday of this week then Tuesday and Thursday next week instead of Tuesday and Thursday this week and Monday, Wednesday, and Friday next week. The reason being that my TV shoes are produced and aired for Tuesday and Friday and now we will not have the classes lined up to do that proper. So instead of having two classes before Friday's airing we have one which meant I was not able to cover the theory and practical part of my course and instead had to concentrate on DAISlive production for Friday. Of course we go forward and getting through the class was fine though there were other delays such as two new students - so I stopped and needed to get them started and we started the class, which was a block two class and in block two we have dear time - drop everything and read - a great thing to do indeed but it takes fifteen minutes out of the block. As we are beginning to focus on USA based standards I will start writing up what standards we are basing each class on as well as essential questions that will be answered within the class time.
Standard 1: Creativity and Innovation |
PO 1. Analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information to generate new ideas, processes, or products. |
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Standard 2: Communication and Collaboration |
2a. Communicate and collaborate with others employing a variety of digital environments and media. |
PO 1. Collaborate with peers, experts, or others in the global community employing a variety of digital tools to share findings and/or publish in a variety of ways. |
Spent too much time again on lesson plans; why not just let the class unfold
instead of sticking to the notes I put many hours into? And sure enough after
ten-minutes of following my notes we got to the core of getting material for
the first DAISlive of the school year. I had planned
30 of the ninety minutes for our newscast but I forgot about discussing with
students how each piece should look. Last year with middle school I pretty much
wrote how and what was done and said. With high school they want to have more
control.
We started
off DAISlive with the head of school saying g'day and welcome back followed by a couple of principals saying welcome to a new school year and
an announcement for the new volleyball team and a beach barbecue Friday and a
few other fluttery pieces.
We never got
to our new video suite today but come next class,
Wednesday - I hope.
Students are
unable to get Google Sites @ home without a VPN so it is back to the old way of
emailing assignments back and forward. Yesterday the school was closed ~ I wrote about that in another blog - Long ways to go….
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