Summer Blog 2008!

Today was my first day actually working in the office this week. It was a very busy/hectic day! I got to meet Craig!! He came in to work on some stuff with Michael.

Amelia and I worked with Mary on Curriki and came up with a concrete list of tasks that we still need to do with Curriki before the summer is finished. Amelia and I worked on the Cyber bullying video. I uploaded photos from the Graham Middle School Teacher Training onto the FTP and re-organized the two Mobile Camera Toolkits. I also entered our two Environmental videos to a drop box for contest entries. This was a lot harder to accomplish than it sounds and I finally needed to get Michael’s help to do it.

Tomorrow Amelia and I are going to write a script for our Cyber bullying video. We already know our concept and what video clips we’ll use. (We’ll shoot everything we need by Monday). We just need a good script to go along with the images now.

craig came in today, that was nice. liz, mary and i discussed curriki updates and figured out how to move lesson plans into the correct collection- helpful! i sat next to matt as he reformatted my tech splained tool kit page that took all day. i did a few random things too, i just cant think of what they were.

thursday, until next week.

Was awesome! Sharron B. (a middle school teacher that works very closely with Nortel LearniT), Carla (who is a 5th grade Science teacher from NC) and myself got a private tour of Nortel’s research facility in NC. Edgar and Sharron took us behind the scenes and showed us the production and marketing aspect of what Nortel does. There’s only 8 locations in the world! It was very cool. Afterwards, I took a train from Newport News to DC and it took forever!! but it was definitely worth it.

too bad that doesn’t exist, but we all have to go back to school soon bummer huh? well yes and no :).
today was somewhat productive, it was only alex, robert and i in the office, robert and i worked on curriki together- i think we have finished linking the featured content section, pretty awesome.

I have been in Durham, NC for the past couple of days.

Yesterday Michael and his wife, Toby, drove up here and had amazing BBQ at a local restaurant (NC’s famous for their BBQ).

Today was a very busy day, I needed to write an email describing today’s events so basically…I’m just going to paste what I wrote into here.

“On Tuesday, July 29th, Nortel LearniT and NASA representatives; Michael Connet, Sharron Bowers and Liz Sedova hosted a teacher-training workshop for middle school teachers at Graham Middle School in North Carolina. The teachers got a crash course on Nortel LearniT’s Moodle website (content.nortellearnit.org/moodle) and explored some hands on projects while learning about technology and it’s implication in the classroom. The first activity, which introduced the 15 participants to each other and to the trainers, incouraged them to go around the school and take pictures of things that represented their own personalities. After that task was completed, Nortel LearniT’s intern, Liz Sedova, compiled a mini video with all of the pictures taken by the teachers in Movie Maker. This was to demonstrate how easy the application really is. The next task for the participants was to take what they learned about the Mobile Camera Toolkit cameras, that Nortel LearniT provided for the training, and Movie Maker, and make their own short movie (fully equiped with audio, titles and transitions) based on a theme that they pulled out of a hat. The themes used were; “The history of Graham Middle School”, “A first day”, “Think Big”, “Science is all around you”, and “Math is everywhere”. The teams of participants did a great job and their hard work was show cased after lunch!

Michael Connet and Sharron Bowers showed a power point to the participants about Nortel LearniT’s official website (www.nortellearnit.org). The participants were extremely impressed by all of the resources that Nortel LearniT has to offer and can’t wait to try them out the various activities in their classrooms!

To end the day-long training session, all the teachers were introduced to nnims. (www.nnims.com) This is a communication software designer for nortellearnit employees to have access to everyone in the global network and to stay connected with their colleagues. All the participants got to explore what they could do on nnims and even made calls to their families.

Nortel LearniT has left a Mobile Camera Toolkit behind for teachers in Durham to use with their students for further exploration of activities.”

The end.

today robert and i worked on the curriki featured content pages, we are almost done, i think there are a billion links within each page goodness.

the second half of the day i worked on the techsplained toolkit page, the page is done now its just about formatting- ezro is ridiculous, so much for everything looking good in dreamweaver.

i’m not as tired as usual but i’m still tired.

today was all about the tech splained page i’m almost finished.

today i hung out with the interns all by myself, good times.

I’m sorry for being so absent this week…I came into work today and then got a call from the landlord of the apartment that I wanted in Richmond telling me that I needed to go sign the lease today before someone else did. So, needless to say, I rushed to Richmond. On the bight side, I now have the apartment of my dreams!!

I’m going to come in tomorrow and get the equipment for our trip on Monday to NC. I’m also going to finish all the loose ends in the Moodle group tonight.

Today was a busy day.

Michael was supposed to go to NC but his flight was delayed so he wound up doing a tele-conference via the telecaster from our studio. Amelia and I helped him with the first session and Darrell conducted the second session. This took up most of the day because we needed to set everything up, test it out and then actually run the broadcast.

I also added all the new members to Moodle and assigned them to the Graham Middle School group for when Michael, Sharron and I go up to NC on Monday.

today was quiet it was only me and robert and sheng here in the office, but i got a lot done, started the techsplained page, recorded a video for that and linked a few things, and i made a few banners for some future pages.

until tomorrow . . .