Back to Basics

New semester is starting and so much to do. But I guess that is really everyone's situation....boring.

Starting with a new group of students and they are going to tackle the issues of netiquette, online safety and security. It's quite a stepback from the fun and engagement of animation that I was doing just a few short weeks ago with my other students. Makes me sad because this work isn't as "fun".

But they don't hire you to do "fun".

Interestingly I've discovered that another middle school computer teacher convinced their principal to buy the Macromedia MX suite as well as Photoshop. That's their entire curriculum. So every 6th-8th grader is spending their years in that building doing nothing but those products. WOW....talk about rogue curriculum. Am I just jealous because I love those programs? Maybe a little. But do I think I should just take off on my own and do something that's so different and is what the HS will be doing with the kids when they are sophomores, juniors and seniors. Don't know that I can say yes. It will be interesting to see what develops and even more interesting to see how the other middle schools react as they find out.........(As an aside, this summer I saw several middle school teachers spoke on using Adobe Elements instead of Photoshop. They were quite convincing about the cost effectiveness of using Elements for this age student instead of Photoshop. They gave a 3 hour seminar and I walked away convinced that Elements was a much wiser investment of dollars for middle schools.)

We will be expanding our curriculum this semester. We believe we have everything down pretty well. And so we will expand into Robolab during the Part II of the computer section of Tech Ed. Animation was pretty challenging and we loved it. But robotics will be the consolidating piece for us with the industrial tech class (in addition to digitial video editing). It will also be something that will totally have students clamoring to learn and build their internal motivation.

Again it will be a learning curve.

Again it will be a chance to be a colearner with my students.

Again I'm excited that I get a chance to engage in that kind of teaching. It's so much more rewarding and fun than teaching them to keyboard and to do Inspiration webs on Netiquette.

But I know we must all learn the basics. Sigh.