Tech Club 11/15

Last week at tech club we introduced the students to Xtranormal.  We had them all create a story on Xtranormal about whatever they wanted.  We had a very small group this time so we each worked one on one with a student.  The 3rd grade girl I worked with was really into the activity--in fact we were rushed towards the end of the hour to get her video published so she could watch it, she spent a lot of time trying to pick her exact characters and voices that she wanted to use (much to my amusement one of her final choices turned out to be Mitt Romney).  All of the kids seemed to have a pretty good time making them and could navigate it pretty well on their own.  I think it is something at least the little I was working with will use again, she was excited to write the website down and go home and show her video to her family.

11/8

This last week we taught our tech club students how to copy and paste and to insert photos into word.  I was surprised by how excited some of them got about it, one of the girls was copying and pasting the entire time and was proud to show Nick and I her finished product.  However, a lot of the kids were pretty bored with it too.  We had them at least work on it for a little bit and then let them play on pbskids.org which they love so much.  One of the girls was playing with Garage Band and she was creating some pretty darn good music, which we played for all of the students near the end of the hour, it seemed to be a pretty good moment for her.  It has been hard from keeping these kids on track and doing what we want them to do, they seem to be pretty used to doing whatever they want.  One of the little girls is pretty active and I have a hard time keeping her from crawling all over the place or trying to leave the classroom. Each week I have had to give her the option of staying on her computer or going back to the gym to join the rest of the after school program, and she usually calms down after that.  Next week I want to try to get there early to get the word exercise opened on each of their computers so they are ready before the kids are able to branch off into other stuff.

Tech Club 11/1

This week was the last week for the 1st cohort, so we kind of collaborated together.  We tried to have the kids type stories about their Halloween on Microsoft Word.  There was quite a range of abilities in the club so while some were able to type up a little story others needed a lot of assistance and focused more on short phrases or single words.  I helped some of these kids, I would ask them a question, such as what their costume was, and have them type it for me.  Sometimes we would chat back and forth so I could have them read what I was writing.  It was interesting to me to see how some of the kids who were so good at playing games online struggled greatly to type and spell.  It made me think that some more typing and spelling kind of activities would be very helpful to them.  They did, however, seem pretty uninterested in the activity, I even had to send one of them back to the gym who refused to participate and wanted only to play games, so we are definitely going to need to try to spice it up a little bit and make it more engaging and structured.