Making Music

I was amazed at how much Cheri was able to finish on her own. I saw what she had done ... her rough edit... and then I showed her how to do transitions and titles. Doing the titles is always a little tricky in iMovie, and this was no exception... But we mustered through it and ended up with a very nice little iMovie. The only thing that Cheri wanted was to add some Native American music to the background. I was able to find something suitable on Freeplaymusic.com
and we added it to the background. We had a finished product!
The only thing left to do was upload the edited video to VHS so that she could use it in her presentation. The long weekend was about to begin, the presentation was a week away, so we called it a day.

A new phase...

Cheri finished up her PowerPoint and then decided that the best way to show her process was with a video. So I showed her how to put photographs and video together in iMovie. We were able to import a bunch of jpgs into the project. I had taken some good shots of the kids sharing their "wampum bead" stories, and so we imported them as well. I showed Cheri how to arrange the clips and also how to take a still frame from the video and use it as a shot.

During the week Cheri came in at lunch and worked on her project independently. I was so impressed with her initiative!

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!

Can you hear the thunder?

I met w/Cheri today, we had planned on getting together just to talk about preliminaries, but she wanted to get started on something right away, so we got started on importing pictures into Powerpoint. First we saved them from her e-mail to a special folder on the desktop. We then opened up the Powerpoint she already started. We inserted a slide and imported 4 pictures. I showed her how to re-size, crop and lighten her pictures. We arranged them on the slide and called it a day.

The sky was darkly overcast to the east as I left school. The sun was still bright in the west. I heard the thunder rumbling as I got on my bike and rode home. I was home for about an hour when the rain really started coming down. The first rain of the season.

Mentee Found!

Well I feel much better about this whole process now that I have identified a mentee. This is someone who has expressed interest in upgrading her technology skills, and this year she is already really branching out. I feel I can work well with her and that the relationship will be a boon to both of us.