Weekly+Journal+for+January+3-10

This week my team posted our student needs assessment results, as well as the three areas we see as our greatest needs. Based on the results we see a need for increased student use of our teacher web sites, as well as the need to improve the students' basic computer skill levels. Many of our students are not comfortable with Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and other programs which we would expect them to have a lot of experience with. In the past our students would have had instruction on these in elementary school. Because of financial problems our district was forced to reduce staff, and eliminate these classes. Obviously we are going to have to focus some instruction time to improving these skills. With only one computer lab, and only a few computers in each classroom, it is difficult to find the time/resources to do this. We also need to try to increase the students' use of technologies as part of their regular clasroom learning. Hopefully the use of some project based learning activities will provide an opportunity to improve in this area. I am confused about what the reading/videos were for this week. I had already seen and read the postings for this week in December. Maybe I just was looking ahead at the time. I have been working on my video presentation. I started a video using Xtranormal. I am having some trouble though. First, I don't like the sound of the computer-generated speech. I wish there was a way to improve on that. Also, I have two characters in my video, but they both sound exactly the same. I'm sure there is a way to fix that, but I haven't found it yet. I also have a scene change in the middle, but for some reason it doesn't change. I am hoping to get some help with it tomorrow from our technology coach, so I can improve it and get it completed on time.