The IEP is DONE! Now I can go to the exotic Galena with one less thing hanging over my head!

Learning all of this technology over the last 7 or 8 months has been one of the most frustrating, challenging, yet overall rewarding aspects of the MAT program. I have stubbornly resisted, relentlessly balked, and bitterly complained about every painful step of progress along this technological road...well, maybe not so bad as that, but you do have to appreciate the tidiness of my parallel structure in such a sentiment.

I am glad to be finished with the class because it is one more milestone completed on the way to my degree, but I know that completion of the course by no means brings finality to technology as a key aspect in my life and career.

In my 6 sample lesson plans for this IEP project, you will see that I used my previous assignment, "Skeleton Woman," as my evidence of having learned new technology. I used the projector to show my movie to the class, and as we read The Pearl by John Steinbeck we focused on 3 main concepts: Oral tradition, Cultural Geography, and Archetypes. In the end of the lesson, the goal is to have the students create digital stories (specifically parables) that model our key concepts and present them in a fashion such as I modeled with "Skeleton Woman," (which creeped them out considerably!)

The projector took me 5 times longer to figure out than Microsoft Movie...there were dialect issues with the tech support line.. the Indian employees kept telling telling me to hit the Fn key, and they just couldn't seem to understand that I'd already hit every effin' key on the dadburn thing! This is a fine example of COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN--Alas! not just a rockin' Led Zeppelin song!

I am thrilled to have the digital story in my tool kit of knowledge and experience. It is a fantastic project that can be used effectively in many different avenues in a language arts class. In fact, I happen to be having my Guided Reading class of 7th graders making digital stories right now. They absolutely love it, and I have been thrilled with how diligently they work on them in the lab. This is a tool that I will use again and again in my teaching career.

I posted my "notes on Skeleton Woman/ Intro to The Pearl Powerpoint" HERE...for any interested souls out there...