Success!

I viewed today as a sort of lithmus test as to my capability as a technology leader within the school. What did I do? Well, my students were on schedule for leading the school in the weekly assembly. So what, you say? Well...it was a little different from the usual poems, songs and posters with speeches that most classes have done to reflect their learning. I wanted to use technology in a meaningful way and so I had the children use the kid pix program to illustrate a statement of their learning about bears that we had done in the past month or so. Each child was to choose one fact that they could illustrate. After they did this picture, I also had them record their voice stating their fact on the slide. I also imported a snapshot of the student to put into the corner of each picture so that when their picture was displayed, you would see their picture, as well as hear their voice. And today, it all went well. Teachers and students, I believe, were duly impressed that Grade 1's could do this work on the computer. I was so very grateful that the technology worked today. There were sometimes in the past few weeks that I wondered at my foolishness in attempting such a thing. No one in our school has done this before so I couldn't ask for help from anyone. I had to learn it on my own. And this is the learning I have done:

- how to make the computer and the projector communicate. Sometimes during my classes when I wanted to show the students what I wanted them to do, I tried to use the projector and it wouldn't work. Ugh! And our little mini-notebooks are not suitable for showing 20 eager students at once. But, if all else fails, read the instructions! Earlier in the week, in a fit of panic cause the projector wasn't receiving the images from the computer, I started to read the owner's manual and lo and behold, there was a neat little trick I could try. The "fn" key together with the F2 turned it all on. Whew!

- how to save so it actually saves! My poor students had to do a minimum of 3 pictures for me before I figured out how to save it so that it worked. Some students, and I still don't quite know why, just couldn't get their pictures saved until the 4th or 5th time. Fortunately, the students are patient with me. :)

- how to use the kid pix program. This was brand new for me and I quite enjoyed it. There are a number of features on it that added a lot to the slide show and it was fun to play with them.

- how to import jpeg files into the kid pix program. Unfortunately, the webcams on our notebooks have been disabled, so I needed to take pictures using my digital camera and then import those pictures to the program. I found this information on the internet using google search.

- how to use my flash drive in yet another way. I found out earlier this week when we were doing a rehearsal in the gym, that the gym does not have wireless and so my slide show, which was saved on the server, was useless as it couldn't be accessed. Thank goodness for flashdrives. And because the program is loaded onto the computers, it was able to read the flashdrive and present.

- how to brainstorm with others. I knew the speakers on the notebook wouldn't be able to project for all 300+ students, but I thought I'd be able to mic it. Unfortunately, even that didn't work. As a few of us were brainstorming about this, the school secretary asked if it was possible to put a speaker jack in and so I brought my computer speakers from home. It worked fabulously! Whew!

But besides all that techie stuff, what did I learn? I learned that leadership often means just doing it! My hope is that teachers will have taken note that our notebooks can be used in educationally sound and relevant ways to the curriculum. Leadership has risks...if this hadn't worked, would the staff view me as someone who is a technology leader? I doubt it. One teacher approached me after the assembly to say that she was going to ask me next year how to do a slideshow.

But mostly I'm just relieved right now. It worked...now on to tomorrow. What should I have the students do with the computers during first block? Hmmm....