School Daze

Friday, July 31 was the last day of school for me. At Lufkin Road Middle School, that is. I've really enjoyed my time there and hope to come back for my full internship. So it was sort of sad, but I didn't have much time to think about it.

It was a busy day. There were new members of the TV news crew as the final track began its new school year. There had also been a storm that created problems with the network connections, so there were lots of questions from faculty to answer. Additionally, in order to accomodate the number of teachers needing access to a computer lab, the school began experimenting with creating an additional lab using laptops and a wireless cart. Since there is always one group of students tracked out, the science room in that pod is converted to a computer lab using the cart. Each time it is set up there are a few glitches. New 6th graders tracking in needed help setting up their usernames and passwords in Blackboard and their were more orientations.

The front page story of the News & Observer was not lost on me, either. I've been job hunting for a considerable amount of time and have a number of resumes sent out to principals and local school districts. The article was about the budget standoff and how teachers, administrators, and parents were frustrated not knowing how many teachers would be hired and how big the resulting class sizes would be. Most schools are not year round and will start in three weeks. It's getting close and the anxiety I feel was certainly echoed in the story.

But the day ended with some fun. Diane is preparing for her National Boards and she's doing a technology project with one of the teachers. They want to set up a history project using Voice Thread software. We ended the day playing with it (I guess I should say, "exploring its features") to see how it worked. We had a mic and a web cam in the back workroom. Sandra and Diane both had accounts. Diane set up a discussion area and Sandra was trying to post audio and video content. We also called in comments on a cell phone. The point of Voice Thread is to hold a multimedia group discussions via the web. The students would get both a technology and a history lesson and have fun doing it. And the software would document the discussion for Diane.

I promised to stay in touch. I'll be really curious to see how both the budget and the Voice Thread play out. And as I mentioned, I hope it's not "good bye", just "see you later".