A little progress!

Yesterday was my regularly scheduled meeting with Cheri. We have had some excitement over the last week that is NOT related to the mentoring project, but I will talk about that later. It turns out that Cheri did not need to have her Powerpoint done as soon as we originally thought, so we have a little bit of a breather.

I was worried and Cheri was also worried about my failure to get her laptop hooked up to a TV screen so that she could share her PowerPoint more easily with her class. This was a setback that we had last week.

Part of the responsibility of being a mentor is to figure out and solve these little problems as they come up. I had e-mailed our district tech support asking for their help with the problem. I suspected that she had a driver missing, but I wasn't sure.

Well what do you know, the tech support guy came to my lab just as I was meeting with Cheri. He fixed one long standing problem and then proceeded to solve Cheri's driver problem. This was great timing on his part!

One of the frustrations of my job is that I have no access to FTP or other ways to download drivers. It seems like it would be so easy to have the onsite person to be able to solve these simpler problems and then free up the tech people for the bigger, network related problems. . .But I guess I am not in charge and there must be a good reason for setting things up the way they are.

However, with the tech support guy there working on her laptop, we had little time left to finish her Powerpoint or start iMovie. She wants to figure out a way to gracefully end the PP and incorporate the video into a presentation she wants to give.

We discussed a make up session, but conference week is next week, so her time is crunched. We will have to figure out something, since she wants to be done by November 10th!

She has taken iMovie classes before, and I gave her my handouts for when I teach the iMovie. Unfortunately, (again) my online video workshop is ALSO blocked from school since all video file formats are blocked. I have asked that site to be unblocked several times already.

Sheesh!

Cheri is making big progress tho, and she was able to see from looking at the control panel, after I showed her, how it looked different from one that had the correct driver. I think this might help her in the future if she ever has to trouble shoot this problem again.

Gathering Nectar; Cross Pollination

I met w/Cheri afterschool again on Friday and we tried to pin down a schedule for getting together. We are going to try for lunch meetings on Tuesdays. While we were chatting she showed me her PowerPoint and she has made some big progress. She imported some scans and sized them and adjusted the contrast on them. Earlier this week I videotaped her kids telling their stories. I showed her the tapes. As part of the project we will be putting some of the kids telling their stories into her PowerPoint.


It is an Amazing coincidence that her project has to do with teaching narrative using oral language and that is a big part of our AR. I am very excited about this partnership!

Things are rolling!

Today I briefly met with Cheri and we talked about some of what we hope to do. We will have a more formal session tomorrow! She had videotaped her class sharing personal narratives using a scaffolding process that uses wampum beads. This is very exciting to me since it ties in directly with our AR project. We talked about how her project compliments my AR. She also was very excited about her Powerpoint and how she was able to add slides to the presentation she is going to use. I think we will be doing both video and Powerpoint together. We will formalize things more at our meeting tomorrow. She was very enthusiastic about our symbiotic relationship!