Busy Week!

Ice Cream
Originally uploaded by Ms Cupcake

It's been a busy week! It started with our Differentiation Day on Monday, where our librarian and myself helped teachers learn how to use Schoolfusion more effectively. We even had time to talk about some web 2.0 tools that could be embedded, such as Blabberize, Voki's, My Studyio, and Glogster (if it's not blocked). Everyone seemed impressed with Blabberize especially. I've received great feedback! Some discussions from the day however, led me to realize that I may need to provide some workshop time on basic tools with Office products, especially Word and PowerPoint. Our librarian was willing to help me with those sessions and I would love the chance to collaborate more with her.

On Tuesday, I worked with our art teacher to start documenting samples of student work for an e-portfolio project our CTE and art classes will be piloting this year. I worked with both the eighth grade classes and soon we will be using PhotoShop Elements to crop pictures and do another project where the students will add filters and manipulate digital photos.

Wednesday was quieter as I was in a TRT meeting in the morning and finished up preparing for the Study Island training session for Thursday afternoon.

On Thursday, I worked with the Science teachers to prepare for the Comic Life project and prepared for the Airliner Training on practice writing for Friday.

Which leads me to today, where I worked on the Study Island Training Video and stopped by some classrooms to see what everyone was up to. I saw a great lesson on discounts in a 7th grade classroom. They reviewed percentages and discounts in their warm-up activity and then "went" to the Ice Cream Parlor and had $25 each to buy as much ice cream as they wanted. BUT, they had to remember that the $25 included a 5% tax and 15% tip. Then they had to calculate how much money they had left over. It was very interesting to see the students helping each other and then get frustrated when they figured up their order and had to take something off because they didn't have enough money left over for the tip! I thought this would be a great smart activity, as well. 8th grade was also doing discounts and I saw one 8th grade teacher using the Smartboard and had a graph with Sales price, discount price, and total price and the students had to figure out the total price and write it on the Smartboard.

Like I said, busy week!  How was yours?