Westest is Almost Here!

May 14th through May 18th is Westtest week. Our students in our final stages of learning as much as we can before that infamous week. Four of my technology classes (grades 6-8) are working diligently this nine weeks on Apangea.com. Our school has partnered with Apangea Learning to bring our students a web-based, supplemental program to help boost mathematics achievement.

10th Annual Robotics Competition at Bridgemont Technical & Community College

 On April 24th, I took my 8th grade Project Lead the Way (PLTW) class (16 students), plus,  21 6th and 7th grade to Bridgemont's 10th Annual Robotics Competition. Normally, there are elementary, middle school, and high school students from all over the state; but this year, only three schools participated. The April snow kept Harrison County away and Greenbrier County (50 high school students) couldn't make it due to a family illness in their instructor's family. 

My PLTW students competed in all five events - Yellow Brick Road, Through the Woods, Golf, Sumo, and Anything Goes.There were three trophies awarded in each event. My students brought home 10 trophies and also won the top team award.

I was very proud of them, for they did the work themselves. They worked in teams and used critical thinking skills and problem solving skills to complete their robotic projects for the competition. The hard work paid off in the end.

School Days Left

Wow, school is out this year on May 24th. That means we just have 17 days to go. This is the earliest that we have gotten out of school in years.Yes, summer vacation is almost here.

 

List of Items to be Finished by May 18, 2012

 Globaloria teams are to finish their game demos and upload them to their team wiki. Next, they are to video their game demo presentations and upload them to their team wiki.Once they have completed that, they are to complete the rest of their team page, which is questions dealing with their final game. Once this is done, they are to work on their final game. On May 17th, they are to upload their final game to their team wiki and to the Game Gallery. Of course, during all this, they are to continue blogging twice each week and keep their learning log up-to-date on a weekly basis.

On May 18th, we will take the final course survey and be finished with Globaloria for the 20011-2012 school year.

Research Visit Follow-Up

The research visit with Rebecca Reynolds and Lars Sorenson went really well. The interviews went as planned. The students felt at ease and enjoyed sharing their work and their thoughts. They each received a gift card for $7 for participating.

Game Demo Status for Class

Three teams have completed their game demos and are presenting them this week. The other five teams are hard at work to get their game demos completed and presented by 5/11/12.This has been a very challenging year, so we hope to get all the game demos done and presented before Westtest.

Rebecca Reynolds' Visit on April 18th

Rebecca Reynolds is a professor at Rutgers University in the School of Communication and Information. Rebecca is also a researcher at Rutgers and she has worked with the World Wide Workshop for several years on researching student learning in Globaloria. She recently received a grant with a colleague at Rutgers' Graduate School of Education that supports some travel and site visits to WV this spring

Rebecca will be visiting our school this week on Wednesday, April 18th. She will be traveling with a graduate student, Lars Sorenson. During the visit, she will talk with 3 teams of our students for 45 minutes each. The three teams will be Team T&J, which is Jackson Davis and Tanner Boyd; Team Halo, which is Anna Osborne and Hailey Lemon; and, Team HODGey and BQ, which is Isiah Hodges, Brendan Quinn, and Bruce Johnson. The students will demonstrate their game demo work as the researchers interview them.The interviews will be video recorded. The main reason for the visit is to conduct research on students' problem- and inquiry-based learning, and use of wiki resources in Globaloria. They are interested in how students are self-structuring their game design, and how a range of different supports are helping them learn.

Game Demos

The class is trying to finalize their game demos so that they can present them. The biggest task is to keep everyone focused on their game demos. It's that time of year when students tend to want to slack off. We will complete the demos.