The End is Nigh

I'm nearing the end of my internship in teaching. I have three weeks left and plenty of things left to do. The week before vacation and this week was filled with facilitating projects, helping 3rd graders learn keyboarding and setting up an after school club and summer camp. I never thought I would be this busy. Some days I rarely see my mentor teacher because I am so busy.

I was approach by a special ed coordinator who wanted to do technology based book projects. I did three different projects. One stop animation using Legos, an animation using Scratch and lastly a newspaper done using Google Draw. Each project was fun in their own right and the students did a wonderful job. This week they are finishing up the projects and presenting them to their class. The animations are short but the students had a limited amount of time to work on the projects. I'm hoping the presentation will go over well and students can see all the fun things they can do with technology.

I was never a fan of keyboarding in school. You had to sit all right and proper and got timed as you typed words into a simple word processor. That being said, technology as done wonders for this skill. Deerfield has a subscription to a keyboarding site called TypingTraining.com. It is wonderful for learners of all ages. Students love it because its like playing games rather then working on how to type, little do they know they are learning quite a lot. It's impressive how fast 3rd graders learn where the keys are on the keyboard and how much their skills improve in a short period of time.

I've also had the lucky chance to take a quarter long class and squash it down to a four day unit. It was no easy feat and the students aren't going to take away too much from the experience but it will be better then not learning it at all. The hardest part is stressing the importance of what they are doing in those few class periods and how it affects them. The thing I like most of it so far is that the class is normally run by 2 or more co-teachers, each one with different styles, but for this shortened unit I'm doing it all by myself which helps both me and the students, less confusion.

I feel a lot more confident in front of a group of students and I have got improvising skills for when things just don't go my way which is most of the time. You just can't plan life. A side note I talked to a first year teacher here at Deerfield. I got to ask a bunch of questions and for the most part what she could answer was what I determined the first year would be like. What she couldn't answer were things that a tech integrator would only have to deal with most of the time. It was insightful but I send so much time alone and have done so much extra stuff that I feel more prepared for that first year... aside from paper work, she said there is a lot of paper work...