For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on modifying my lesson plans for my upcoming web design class. It’s a shorter class than I taught last year, so I want to make sure that I’ll be able to cover all of the topics that I want to cover. I leave it up to the students as to how much we cover – even though it’s summer school, I still want them to enjoy the class. I had to do a lot of editing work in terms of topics – I tried to scrunch a four week class into a two week session. Out went all of my Web 2.0 focused classes – instead of a day focused on these tools, we will discuss how they are used throughout the course. I did manage to free up two days, in which I am going to try to teach a little bit of Scratch, a programming language. Nothing too intensive, but I want the students to have a taste of it – maybe they will be encouraged to take up computer science and programming!
I actually just finished teaching a three week summer school class on video production last week. It was a good turn out this year – 6 students. We were all able to create videos individually and to learn how to work as a group to create one product. I think it went well, and the students had so much fun creating videos and learning how to edit them. While it would have been grand if I could have shown the students how to use iMovie, I was working at a school that did not have Macs for their students – we were working on Windows PCs, using Windows Movie Maker. The ideas are the same, though the steps might be different. We created three major projects – a commercial, a mini-documentary, and a music video. I have to send the videos to my students soon, since I’m sure they would like to have them.
It’s been a very busy summer…I’ve been teaching summer school all summer, plus have presentations to plan! I ended up getting two proposals accepted at Internet Librarian 2011 and one for CLA 2011 in Pasadena. Man, this will be a busy year for conferences. I’ll divulge a few more details about my presentations in a later post.