Thursday, March 16, 2006This morning, I showed the 5th grade class all about the animation feature of Gimp. This requires that they begin to work with the different layers. Each layer is considered a new frame in the animation. I showed them how to enable or disable various layers, and how to limit the amount of time that the animation paused at each frame. I got the feeling that some of the students caught on much quicker than others did. Next week, I plan on introducing them to the NY Times Education section. This will be similar in structure and intention to the webquest I showed them. Hopefully, they will remember some of the features and lessons learned in that excersize. I have had some difficulty with individual student accounts and Word, as well as the Gimp. I told the students to use the Student account with the Gimp. I am not sure how to resolve this issue. I think I may install aliases in the students folders on the server, but I'm not sure this will end up working or not. The server is running out of room primarily because of the archiving of fonts carried out by these applications. Next, for Mr. DeLacruz's class, I talked rather extensively about different cables and ports that the computer uses. I introduced the concept of bandwidth, describing it as a road. The Firewire cable is like a 4 lane interstate highway, and the telephone wire is like a driveway. I described the differences in the cable connections. I then allowed them to pass around telephone, USB, Firewire, and ethernet cables. I also talked about what the ports were and where the were placed on the Computer. I also demonstrated how the USB extensions could be used to extend the keyboard far away from the computer. posted @ 01:45 PM MST [link] [No Comments] Tuesday, March 14, 2006Yesterday's classesWe started with Mr. Hodge's fifth graders. We took an initial look at PowerPoint. I discovered that they would have a tough time with Microsoft office applications loading on their personal acounts. The mac server is running out of space. I may have to rethink storage. I showed them how to import an image into their presentations. In the future, we will find images to download and then import them. Or, we will create images and then import them. I have installed an image editting software that can be used to create pictures. After being saved, these images can then be imported into Power Point. For the Fourth grades, I introduced them to the Gaggle emailing program. They were unable to send each other email, and so I must figure out what is missing in their configuration. Some of the students had to have rethought logins. I would like to address this so that I may use a standardized system. I think first name, first initial of last name, and a number would work. I need to look into this more closely in the future. First grade failed to show for some reason. *Today* I had no classes this morning, as CSAP is still in effect. The typing time class progressed without incident. In 2 minutes, I will show a first grade class how to print their name from Micorsoft Word. posted @ 04:22 PM MST [link] [No Comments] |
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