Ramblings March 22, 2008
Posted by Steve in Musing.Tags: coursecompass, CSTA, horizonproject2008, IST
add a comment
I had promised myself that I would be more regular with blog entries but it has not taken place. Once I swung back into the full classroom teacher mode, time became in short supply. Who says time is not linear? I have not even downloaded sessions from EdTech Talk to listen on my iPod.
I had committed myself to the Horizon Project 2008 but concluded I was unable to meet with a group of students for an hour a week outside the normal timetable. I had to withdraw and that irked me to no end. I will need to run with a collaboration project with a class in the future.
My Year 9 IST class has been enrolled in Course Compass. It is like Moodle but based on Blackboard. The real time communication modules had promise but more often than not, falls over and is not effective. Sending emails to the class in one hit is efficient. It turns out, the animations on Course Compass are far too few. I guess I am not structured enough to run with Course Compass. I know where I want to be at the end of a week but interruptions causes me to adjust to a lesson by lesson basis, especially if a number of students are missing.
I have spent many hours preparing and dealing with Computing Studies Teacher’s Association administration. Many hours went into preparation for the 2008 Annual General Meeting. Overall, the sessions went off well and the actual Annual General Meeting went off without a hitch. Thankfully, I prepared an itemised agenda to go through. I almost forgot to do it. The committee members were terrific in carrying out their specific tasks be it purchasing supplies for the weekend and filling in various gaps. Unfortunately, the parking at the venue was too expensive and we won’t be returning there in 2009. The evaluations gave the venue the thumbs down. Due to circumstances, the Secretary ended up doing the job of three people since two were not available due to family circumstances. He deserves a commendation medal.
The new CSTA committee has met for the first time and the character of the committee will change. The committee is now up to 20 from 15 which is a vast improvement. Again, I have spent many hours preparing the Inservice forms for the May meeting as well as communing with the 10 presenters. I place documents on Google Docs for collaboration and to allow those committee members interested to see where things are headed.
It appears I will need to spend quite a bit of time reviewing, learning new programming languages. It looks like I have to move away from VB 6 and move onto VB 2008 Express, RealBasic and Scratch.
