My IEP-2008-2009-Yearbook with Thorne Bay Logging history

Reflection on the IEP Process and What I Learned

In January, it occurred to my principal that our school hasn't had a yearbook in several years.  As I am teaching the high school technology course, she asked if we could fit it into the course during the last semester. "Sure," I said, not having any idea of what I was getting into. As part of their preparation, the students reviewed the work of commercial yearbook publishing companies and thought they could do better. They wanted their year/generation to be layered on pictures of the history of logging that established Thorne Bay.  So all design and layout was created by the students. Only the final PDFs were sent to a local printer for publishing.

My students and I would need to become proficient in a variety of programs on our Macs to graphically design and manage the business of publishing a yearbook.  We needed to create spread sheets for invoices and accounting of advertisement sales, we crafted business letters for local donations, we edited the yearbook pages with Photoshop and Pages, finally all files were saved as pdfs and put into a layout for a 52 page yearbook printed in color.  They also did tons of fundraising to raise the 50% deposit to the printer.  

As I write this entry, I am in Ketchikan about to bring the semi-final files to the publisher and see how this comes out!  Some (low quality) sample pages the students produced for the yearbook can be seen here.   Read more of my reflection on publishing a yearbook.

Technical Skills Development and Evidence of my work in Pages.  This application has become my go to app for word processing. The first doc was quick and dirty.  This document I did for the MAT AK History class, and I like the results.

Classroom Application and Lesson Plans

The syllabus, lesson plans, handouts, and student business letter samples for my Yearbook/Technology class have been included here.

Cutthroat and Rube: The Digital Story

Last fall my students were studying the Water Cycle, so we transformed an aquarium into a water cycle in the classroom complete with evaporation and precipitation.  Soon after they were doing Stream Team where they monitor the health of a local stream.  While doing this they collected a small cutthroat trout in the stream bed sediments.  Our aquarium didn't have any inhabitants so in went the trout.  

Throughout the course of the year that trout has been incorporated into almost every unit we have studied in our science class.  Along the way the students have borrowed my camera and taken A LOT of footage of the trout. For our simple machine unit the trout took center stage again as the object of their Rube Golberg Machine's mission.  They set their machine up so they could turn the lights on in the morning and it would feed the trout!  See the video on YouTube here.

I used a digital story map to guide editing of the huge amount of footage the students collected during the yearlong experience with the cutthroat trout. All though I already had the footage creating the map really helped me fine tune what story I wanted the movie to tell.  The project was such a success other teachers in the district have asked for the movie to get their students working with simple machines.

Online Forum Participation

I have joined a few online forums that I refer to quite a bit when I am lesson planning.

  

The first is a Yahoo! group for Middle School Science teachers.  I have only asked one question on this forum but I received several suggestions for a chromotography exercise with my students. Membership is required but not too difficult to sign up for.

Another forum I signed up with is the  Teach-Nology teacher forum. My state mentor suggested this resource.  I have implemented a series of closure exercises for formative assessment with my students.  The closure exercises were based on some entries that were actually in the forum archives.  I find that most of my questions can already be answered by a search of the forum.

Finally, in another MAT class, Alaska History: People and Resources and the Curriculum Development course we use a forum for turning in our assignments.  Again, you need to have an account for this one, so I have not included a link here.  By reading our classmates' entries we are able to cover a lot of area without doing redundant research. This is more relevant to our MAT experience but I hope to incorporate some things I have learned there in the classroom.