Tech Club Day 3

This week we introduced Google Earth to the students in tech club.  We got 5 new students who hadn't worked with the tech club before.  We decided to come up with a list of places the students would search for like Mt. Everest, Eiffel Tower, their house etc.  Trying to find their houses was probably the most exciting part for them.  It was really cool for them to see their houses from the sky.  They also enjoyed looking at their school and MSU.  A lot of the students started to get bored with the project after a while. I had a first grade student again and it was hard for her just to type in the places to look up.  She didn't fully understand really what we were doing.  She thought that Mt. Everest was a really cool place to look at though, which was exciting to see. We also looked up Disney Land.  Some students stopped working on google earth for the last 15 minutes of our time together.  One student worked on educational games, the other played on Tux paint.  There was one student though that really really enjoy Google Earth and was looking up places I had never even heard of.  His father is a geologist so it was really interesting to see all the places he was interested in seeing.  We aren't sure yet what we are doing next week since we had troubles taking up the entire time.  We will get together or email each other over the week.

Tech Club Day 2

This day of tech club we are continuing the work of the digital stories.  The children have really enjoyed the project thus far and are content on working on it for another week.  We did run into the problem of losing one project because some of the computers got mixed up and a project got deleted.  It was really upsetting to a 3rd grade girl.  I think the actual digital story project has been successful because the students really enjoy it.  Some of the students did get a little bored by the end of today though, so we will be introducing google earth to them next week.  I did have to sit with one 1st grader the whole time and help her spell everything she was searching.  It wasn't bad, but a little harder with the young ones.

Tech Club Day 1

I am doing my tech club experience at Morning Star School from 4-5 p.m.  We will always have about 5-10 students, and they are subject to change depending on our activities.  The coordinator wants us just to find something fun and educational that uses involves typing.  We are allowed to use Mac Books provided to us by the school.  The first day we just observed the other group working with the kids on digital stories.  The project had already lasted a couple of weeks, but the children still wanted to work on them.  The  students would make a movie about any topic they wished to do.  Some added voice overs.  They seemed to really enjoy working with the program iMovie.  I am worried I won't be much help because I am not use to using Macs.  I think this is a great project for students to use.  I'm excited to see how well the students will be able to use this because it should be a good lesson plan when I am working in an elementary school myself.