Reading Project--Day Two

Day one went well. We didn’t get as many students recorded as we would have preferred.

By the end of day two, most of the students had been recorded. A few absent students will have to be recorded later, as well as about three who did not have time to be recorded.

Unfortunately, since I have been mostly supervising students in my room while they recorded, I have not had the opportunity to observe the students listening to themselves and working on their reflections. I hope to have a chance to do so once school begins again. I will have to work with the few students who have yet to record, but I have been told by the Reading teacher that she has not yet had the opportunity to work with the students in Word before, so I will have to be present to make sure everything goes smoothly as far as saving documents, and helping students who are not familiar with 2007.

Again, I hope that the students take advantage of the opportunity they are given for reflection in this activity. After spending a few days with the classes, and the activity, I’m beginning to think that, given the chance to do this or a similar activity again, I would avoid the word reflection with the students. It has a somewhat bad connotation with them—they think it’s a joke and/or don’t really understand what it means. I would keep the directions the same, but I would come up with a different word to replace reflection.

The students are doing well with the technology. A few have had technical difficulties, but most of those are related to students playing with the program before recording themselves and accidently changing the settings. They are also being relatively mature about using it. A few have recorded the teacher while she was giving directions, but most listened to directions and waited to record themselves. Several were very nervous about recording themselves and had to deal with “the giggles” before starting. Quite a few required a countdown to get started. However, I only had one student who was being deliberately disruptive. He was sent back to class where the Reading teacher dealt with him. He was reassigned to the final recording group and, his second time around, was as well behaved as the rest of the students.

The second part of the project is unfortunately becoming a scheduling issue. We had a vague timeline established for it. But, we had two snow days in one week, and will now not see the students until Tuesday of next week (the day we had hoped to begin the video recording). I will have to meet with the Reading teacher and figure out how we want to proceed. I am hopeful that she will not decide to forget the rest of the project because of time. She is very excited about it.

I did have the chance to look through her directions for the rest of the project. She divided the overall project into tasks with due dates: find an article, adapt the article, save the article, practice and record yourself reading the article.

At the moment, she has the students saving the webpage where they had the article posted to the teleprompter. I’m not completely sure that that will work the way she anticipates, and I will have to check on that before meeting with her. I’m also going to recommend that she has all of the students print out their adapted article so that anyone without computer access can practice from the typed article while not having to individually admit that they don’t have internet access.