Where do the days go?

Where do the days go?  It seems only yesterday it was Monday, and now its Friday night.  I see that I am not alone in choosing this wind down time to post a few comments.  

1. More technology has been added to my classroom.  Today a Promethean board was mounted and should be operational soon.  I'm very excited about this addition to my classroom and the new presentation styles it will open up for me.  I was originally slotted to get a "smart board", but the dimensions would not work and it was thought that the accuracy of the Promethean board would be beneficial to the curriculum I have in engineering classes.  I'm especially excited about the stylus that came with it as it seems a more accurate, pen like tool than those I've seen with the smart boards.

2. Teaching new software to kids...ouch!  Its been a painful two weeks as I work through an Autodesk Revit tutorial with my civil engineering students.  I found myself testing many different strategies to minimize the need for me to work one-on-one with each student when they encountered problems.  I even surveyed them via "survey monkey" to get their feedback on how things were going.  My greatest challenge has been literacy.  The students just don't want to read the step-by-step manual and "do" what it requests.  Some are ELL students, some are below grade level readers, some aren't motivated, some are distracted....I find that most questions can be solved by reading the step aloud to the student, pointing out the details in picture provided, or just asking them to open the book to the page they believe they are on. With the limitation of 55 minute class periods it has been difficult to be available equally to all students.  One strategy that was fairly successful was to engage those students who were completing the tutorial more quickly to become peer mentors for the day.  This allowed us to answer 4 times the number of questions at a time than if I performed this task alone.  I can't wait to get beyond this point in the curriculum so that each of my classes can reflect on the process and determine a better way to do it in the future.    I am happy to report that even with these delays the students seem quite amazed at the houses they are building in the 3-D software.  I think they will really like it when they are building homes of their own design.

3.Blogging.  Unfortunately it seems that Thing 2 is about Thing 50 on my to do list.  I will be traveling to Fargo, ND for a conference on Sunday/Monday/Tuesday and hope to use the wifi connection in my hotel room to catch up on my MILI obligations.

4. Wondering if anyone in the MILI group has gotten one of the clicker  "poll your students" classroom technology devices yet.  I don't know the name of it, but I thought I heard that teachers could get one if they promised to go to the training and use it regularly as a part of their curriculum.  Please let me know if you have any knowledge of this MPS technology offering.  Thanks.