Why 2013 is the best class EVER

This morning as I was greeting the students who came in to the lab, we were chatting about how much school they have left this year. I told them that I remember last summer when they were fresh out of middle school and still a little uncertain (even if they were pretending not to be) about heading off to high school and about what being in ITA would be like. But now, they have done their Many Uses of Computers camp last summer, so they can identify parts of a computer and they can make power point presentations; they have had a graphics design unit, either in Illustrator or Photoshop, so they can create and manipulate images for electronic media; and they have had a semester of web design, so they are familiar with html code and css design. They know a lot! They also have a lot of useful, hands-on, personal experience using software that most high school students their age are probably not even aware of. They are visibly more confident and relaxed (and taller) than they were last summer. I am impressed with them. They have worked hard all year and it has been a pleasure to be their instructor.

Today we started the day with a few minutes to finish up some things they need to fix for their Behind the Wheel project. AJ had evaluated their projects and saved some comment sheets for each team. They got right to work. Then they had 25 minutes to do a road test where they were required to build a  website when they were given the necessary files to do so.

Then, after a short break we went upstairs to join AJ for an introduction to Vegas Video camp. AJ did a great job of getting the students excited about what they can do this summer with video camp.

AJ talked to us about ways to plan a good movie and showed us a music video he made. Then I reviewed the design principles with everyone. Then AJ had the students identify props used in his video. This allowed the students to discuss and identify various elements that make up a movie. Then students brainstormed movie ideas.

AJ did a really great job of getting the students excited about what they can do this summer with video camp.

Trying not to doze off "Behind the Wheel" on a Cold Spring Morning

(Stephanie and Jacob are making a website!)

This morning in Felipe and Eliza's room, students got off to a bit of a slow start -- maybe the frosty morning made everyone's blood a little sluggish. At 5 minutes after 9, many students still had not arrived (although Aneda was here bright and early!).

Our first activity today was to look at a spreadsheet that Felipe had made detailing each group's BTW project and which parts need work. Eliza went over the spreadsheet with the class, showing the groups that some of the sites were in good shape, while others were still looking illegible or missing images. Then we got right to work. Illa was popping up out of his chair a lot to talk to every one else on his team, so he had to be reminded firmly to focus on his own screen.

Aubrey, Lucy, Remi, Nick, D.J. all needed to take a CSS and HTML permit test while the others were working on their BTW.

Snapshot at 9:47 from my view at the back of the room (Eliza): Illa is working on summaries of the Friday trilogy movies, which his group as titled ITA Saturdays; Remi is focused on his permit test;  Juan is looking at his scores in Panda, but Eliza has reminded him repeatedly to concentrate on his summaries of the Toy Story movies; David is busily grafting his photo on to the head of a the Toy Story astronaut; Lucy is moving quickly through her permit test on Learn@UW; Jacob is cleaning up a graft of what looks likes Remi's head on to an X-Men poster; Aubrey is working on his permit test I can't see Aneda's screen clearly, but she seems to be working on summaries; for some reason, Collin is looking at You Tube videos (hopefully those having to do with his Blade trilogy work); DJ too is on Learn@UW taking a permit test; Stephanie is fixing html code for her site and flipping back and forth between that screen and gmail chat where she seems to be chatting with Jacob about their work (following our instructions to be quiet while others work on their permit tests); I just had to remind Jose again to focus on his summaries; Juan M. is busily editing HTML code, and Nick is working on his permit test. Full circle! Illa is still looking for a summary of the last Friday movie (with a significant sidetrack into image databases).

So far it seems that students have made significant progress.

10:06 and the room is silent, with only the sounds of clicks and keyboards (amazing).

Felipe warned the students that this really is the last day they will have time to work on their BTW in class REALLY TRULY (because sometimes we say that and it is an idle threat because we really give them them another chance). Next week the student will do introductory stuff for the summer video unit, so there really will be no time for working on the BTW.

Then we had a break and we consumed some sugary snacks  . . .

Excell stopped by to let everyone know that they need to turn in important paperwork so that they can stay in ITA. (Get that paperwork done, students! We want to see you back next year!!)

After the break, Illa asked Eliza to look at the summaries he had written for the ITA Saturday movies. He had written some amusing stories--and quite well done (although we did have to fix some mistakes with capitalization). Way to go, Illa!

(Everyone is working hard at ITA!)

Yes, in spite of a few early reminders to concentrate, after a little while the students got focused and really worked hard for the rest of the day. 

We ended the day with a Dreamweaver test and a blog.

Thanks to Felipe for great session photos!!!!

Spendin' some time behind the wheel and drivin' our html code towards a road test

This morning we started with Education hour working on the Behind the Wheel projects. Felipe had each group of three sit in order so all those working on codes were on the left side of the room and all those working on creative content were on the right side of the room. Illa was being creative by working people from ITA in to the plot of the film trilogy his team is making in to a website. Patrick was having some trouble focusing and being creative; his group has had "creative conflicts" from the beginning, but to their credit, the actual work itself is getting done.

Snapshot of a moment in time: Felipe is bent over Nick's computer, helping him adjust his html code; Juan M. is staring at his screen, busily editing code; DJ is now consulting with Felipe about something Felipe is projecting on the classroom screen; Juan A. is editing code; Stephanie is really working hard on her code editing; Jacob is cleaning up his photo edits, adding Stephanie's face from a Facebook photo; Patrick is working on turning his summaries of the Blade trilogy, which he copied from the internet, into something more creative and personal; Collin just finished adding his own head to images of the Blade movies (Patrick is refusing to allow his team to use his face since they won't let him be the character he wants to be in the movie cast); Aubrey is adding Excel's face to a Rush Hour poster; David is adding Juan's face on to a Toy Story image; Jose is working with David on editing on the Toy Story image because they decided to collaborate on the images and then collaborate on the writing; Illa is being very creative (and talkative) while re-writing the plot of the Friday movies to fit his team's "ITA Saturday" theme; Remi is working in adding Illa's face to the movie posters and (full-circle) back to Nick, who is still working on code.

Remi found a great photo of Excel when he was in high school. He has a 70's hairstyle and is in a cafeteria drinking milk. Funky! During break, everyone came in from the other classroom to take a look.

Work time continued in a similar fashion through all of Education and Exploration periods.

Then everyone got silent while each student worked on his or her html and css test on learn @ UW. Felipe watched everyone like a hawk while Elizabeth went in to the hallway to supervise Patrick while he tried to get the trouble with his net ID worked out. It seems he finally has access (yay!).

Everybody did some bloggin and then we saved our files and left to get some Thai food (yum).

Satatat Session 8 WEBBIN'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmGr4yfXBCg

Dear today,

Started off with everyone getting into their groups, and lining up by role. The coders were few -- we only had four groups, and of that Besma was in the other room and Marcie wasn't here -- but then Besma showed up and Sarai pinch hit for Marcie.

Besma's site was near done, and entirely original. Kim and Sarai quickly caught their groups up with the pre-made code, and Saige had finished typing up the HTML at home and continued to work on CSS.

Oscar rocked on the images for cheetah girls. Erica had already made a bunch of images at home.

Copy text ("copy" being publisher-speak for text/writing) was spewed out by Clara and Ibadete, who both wrote short novels for their BTWs.

Dylan rocked out in the front of the room, building his own custom site from scratch.

In the final hour, everybody took the second attempt at HTML/CSS. It was awesome. Some people complained, but jokingly.

Best,
ITA Session

Sat Number 7

Word,

In room B109, the class participated in A.J.'s Web Presentation, a fantastic display of web knowledge and review that brought a number of student's up to speed in all things web design.

A.J. presented first the general idea of building a website, then got into specifics in HTML and CSS, with usage, syntax, and purpose. Students used a worksheet to practice select topics.

After a period and a half of the assessment, the Exploration section saw a massive increase in BTW productivity. Students worked in near silence, with extreme diligence, on their BTW projects.

The last period was three fold: a Dreamweaver first permit attempt (which went quite well), then a blogging question/summary assessment of how BTWs are going, then a last 15 minutes or so on the BTWs.

In short, it was a solid ITA Saturday.

April 10 (not a day for fools)

ITA Freshmen were no fools today! Much was accomplished by all! Students worked on their BTW projects, where each team of 3 students is designing a website about a movie trilogy. Today, the coders worked closely with Felipe to get their website codes all established and working cleanly. Those students responsible for the written content and images worked on their parts, with help from both Eliza and Felipe. The teams made progress. Some students were using the built-in cameras to take photos for their websites. They were adopting facial expressions and poses that imitated the original photos and still shots from the films  . . . v-hilarious! You should have seen Juan A. looking "intense" . . . . It's cool too that the students recognize visually that a full-front facial view is different from a 3/4 facial view, and that they were wanting to create the right sorts of views so that when they added their own faces to the original image, it would look as authentic as possible.

After a break, everyone took the Dreamweaver permit test and worked on daily blogs.

All morning the class was busily engaged and working hard.

Web Unit Session 6 in b207

Today the session was a bit different for the students. They had AJ come in and do an AJ Stop-in, which was new. That took both Education and Exploration. Afterwards, they had their permit test in Certification and a blog prompt to answer. Although initially the students were told that they'd have time during Exploration to work and finish any of their previous projects and time to work on their BTW in Certification, the AJ Stop-in took more time than anticipated, so they will be left for next week, when AJ will do his thing in Kevin's room.
During Education, AJ came in to do his Stop-in. His goal was to inform and assess the students. He had a presentation that was essentially a survey of the HTML and CSS. It wasn't about what Kevin and/or Felipe had been teaching in the classrooms, it was about HTML and CSS in general, what they should know about them regardless of the instructor. He had a nice powerpoint with some cool graphics filled with awesome information (although the orange text was a little hard to read), like the differences between the types of CSS. He also heavily emphasized the terms attribute, property, and value and what is associated with each one. This seemed to help the students. AJ had a worksheet for the students to fill out as he taught. There were points in his presentation when he'd pause to have the students fill out something based on a prompt. There was also a section of the worksheet with missing HTML elements and the students had to go through and find and fix them all. This went pretty well. AJ and Felipe went around and helped the students when they raised their hands and stayed with a specific student for a little bit at a time. In general the students were able to identify and correct the broken HTML. The students took a break after AJ finished going over his presentation. After (a shortened) break, the students came back to finish the AJ Stop-in. During Exploration, AJ had a more hands-on activity, in which he had the students fix his website, because he forgot to make a page for the puppets...
After a quick demonstration by AJ, the students grabbed AJ's files off the network and began to work. They had to create a new text document, name it appropriately, and change the file type to HTML. Once they had that, they had to open up one of the pages with an editor, copy the HTML, and paste it into their newly-created puppets.html. Once the text was in there, they had to reword a few tags so it was clear the page was about puppets. During the rewording part, Stephanie went ahead and stared adding in the image. She managed to do it all on her own, calling Felipe and AJ over just to make sure she was doing it right. She added the image on her own while going ahead of everyone else. Yeah, that's the same Stephanie who, when AJ asked if she was ready in the morning, had to be given a few extra minutes to raise her hand! It was awesome. A lot of the students had similar situations--they'd call over an instructor to check to see if the work was right, and more often than not, it was. Fixing AJ's site went really well overall. The students seemed to like it to. AJ also talked about and demonstrated how to slice an image or web layout in Photoshop. He demonstrated it with his Thailand website: he had the .jpg image in Photoshop, talked about how he could do it by cropping and undoing, and then showed the students how to use the slice tool. He then talked a little about file organization, about how if you're not using a file in your website, you should delete (and did so with some unused slice images) and talked a little about Serif and Sans Serif fonts.
After the second break, the students had to take their permit test. The test didn't seem to go as well at first, but looking at reports from past classes, it seems that it went just as expected. In actuality, Felipe's class, with the AJ Stop-in, had about 10% higher scores on average than Kevin's class, who is going to be getting the AJ Stop-in next session. It seems the AJ Stop-ins work really well! The day ended with a blog prompt asking the students about their thoughts on the AJ Stop-in and on the permit test and asking for a screenshot of their puppets.html page. The general consensus from the students was positive regarding the AJ Stop-in and not so positive on the permit test.
Here's David's artifact:

In general, most of the artifacts looked like that as well, except David also changed the text for the page, which no one else did.

Next time in The Web Unit:

Students will see time to complete any previous projects they may not have completed, or may not have been satisfied with. If it becomes that a student claims to be done, they will be asked to work on a project. The HARDEST project (in their opinion). Everyone will be working on something. No. Ex. Cu. Ses. Felipe will (should) make an announcement telling the students that they will need to have a rough draft of their BTWs DONE by the end of the [April 10th] session. As students will see Spring Break before that session, No. Ex. Cu. Ses.

Tune in next time!