Tech Club 10/25

For our first day at tech club, we observed the students from cohort #1 on their last day of tech club, and joined in on some interactions with the students.  Whittier elementary school has a very popular after school club from what I saw, there seemed to be 50+ students participating.  Tech club, however, is just one part of the after school program, and only students who want to go to tech club have to participate, so there are only a small number that we will be interacting with.  It sounds like it is often the same students each time, with sometimes a few extra on any given day. Yesterday there were 3 girls and 2 boys who came into the library for tech club.  There wasn't a specific plan for this day, the kids were allowed to play the instructional game of their choosing, and most of the students went to pbskids.org to play games.  While it seemed like the kids were pretty interested, sometimes it seemed as though they didn't really know what they should be doing and seemed to seek some kind of guidance.  For this reason I am hoping to provide pretty specific instructions for activities each week so the kids know what they should be doing and to help keep them interested in their activities.  I also think it will be important to establish some regular rules for the students to follow. There were a few times that students had to be told and retold to turn the volume down on their computers, things like that that will be easier to address right away and hopefully just one or a few times instead of every day.  In general I think this tech club will be relatively easy to manage with the large space we are provided, the individual laptops, and small number of students attending.  They seem like really good kids who are pretty funny, I look forward to seeing what we come up with together.

Digital Story assignment

This was my first time ever using iMovie, and that is probably going to show! I really did find the tool very interesting and yes, I could have spent hours messing around with it learning about all the different things it can do.  I am also pretty unfamiliar with using macs so it was hard for me to try to make a movie in a 2 hour period.  However, I am glad I learned about iMovie and definitely feel like I can apply it in the future in my high school english classes.
The digital story I attempted was a trailer for a book.  I think it would be a fun alternative to a book report for students, in which they can incorporate what they have gleaned from a book into a trailer about the book to show to other students.  It would probably be used in a class of mine in which I have the students choose a book from a list I provide, so that everyone makes a different trailer about a different story to present to their peers.  Of course their movies would be a lot more informative than mine was, definitely longer, and would actually incorporate some plot points. I was going to try to do this myself and put in some voiceovers to read the quotes I incorporated but I simply ran out of time.
I like the idea of using this in my class for something like this, it definitely wouldn't replace all essays as writing will be a big emphasis of mine but I think it would be a fun assignment to keep students interested and  allow them to apply their analytical skills creatively to what they are reading.