Behind the Scenes Stuff

This blog is much more about the behind the scenes stuff. I have put in hours, but they are all in weird ways like emailing the Speech Therapist who I was working with, getting a form, blogging, and meeting with Dawn twice. I also have been trying to contact the Director of the school I am working in to conduct a formal interview to see what the true needs of the school are and not just allow myself to come into a system and decide what it needs as an outsider. My ideas going in to this meeting are a power point with audio to help the class I am working with that does not have the funding to get the supplemental material which would help the students prepare for their graduation tests. The way the literature section is set up right now, only allows the students to view the literary terms from the textbook and read the definitions. While this does help the students identify what the terms look like and mean, the students still would not be able to look at a passage on a test and discern that the author was using one of those terms. Another issue with only reading the textbook is that the students have no idea how to pronounce these sometimes difficult words like "onomatopoeia". One of the students is actually working on his computer skills, powerpoint skills, and literary skills all at the same time. We are a team and creating a powerpoint using ten of these 150 terms. Each word has a slide with the word and definition. At school tomorrow, we are going to use the internet to look up examples of these terms, and the student will decide which example he likes the best for the powerpoint. If I was able to use this as a part of my project, I could make a full powerpoint of all of the terms, add sound, add graphics, add more examples, and could make this available online as a free resource for teachers to use with other students across the nation working to have their students to pass the graduation exam. I was really hoping to meet up with the Director this week, but I have not received any reply to my email. I may go ahead and send her another or speak with her tomorrow if I see her in the halls. I believe that getting people on board and contacting the right sources for meetings is by far the hardest part of this scholarship project. I want to help people and throw myself fully into the projects when I know what is to be done and what people want. This is just the difficult and frustrating stage of waiting, contacting, and researching. I am also planning to interview my host teacher tomorrow to see what she would like to see implemented at the school. I would also like to ask her opinion on how technology is used in the school and should be used in the school. I could also find out her background with technology because she has been teaching at this program for 10 years. I am sure that she has seen this school go through many large changes in the use of technology over the years. I am interested in hearing her responses and doing some research on my own. This school really does need people to support it and show these kids that someone really does care. One of my friends who is also student teaching at this school is painting a mural on the wall next week. This will be a reminder to the teachers and students that someone cares and add some beauty to the white washed walls and falling down buildings. So in summary a lot of this week's hours have been accumulated through observations, meetings, emails, reflection, and learning this about my new school environment in Milledgeville and how to help it. I really hope this next project is about to get started and moving to a point where I can really begin again to make a tangible impact on this town.
(14 hrs.)