Tech Club Final Day (6)

On this final day at tech club I am the first to arrive.  There are two students who have worked with us before and so after I get set up they begin working on their projects about 15 minutes early.  I am okay with this because they already know what they are doing and the others will be here soon enough.  After a while more kids come and join and we get all of them to create new projects.  They want to see how much they can finish on this last day.  Also, Mel brought a flash drive so the students could have their projects saved and sent home with them.  They got really excited about that. I have gotten a really bad cold and am trying not to work too closely to the students, but it gets unavoidable when another first grade girl comes in to work.  She gets super frustrated really quickly.  It was hard to work with her because she just kept yelling at me.  I tried to be as patient as possible, but I know I was not completely successful due to the short temper I get when I am ill. Overall though today was very successful and I truly think that digital stories was a great activity for these students to work on.

Tech Club Day 5

This week we are continuing to work on the digital stories.  We are again in the classroom where we began doing tech club.  It is nice using a classroom because there are less distractions and we aren't distracting the the other activities going on in the library.  The kids who came again this week which were here last week want to start over on their projects.  I am working with a little girl again who needs help with all of the spelling and sometime with the motor skills.  It is really difficult for these first graders to click and drag the picture onto the desktop and then back into iMovie.  They get it to the edge of the mouse pad but then aren't sure how to drag it further.  I just try to be encouraging saying they almost got it so they do not get too frustrated.  With the encouragement this girl starts to thrive.  I am glad I have two other leaders in my group as this girl takes up all of my attention.  Again the movies are going over great.  We are coming back tomorrow to finish up our tech club visits before all our finals and homework gets crazy next week. Miss Mel warns that these students we have today will not be there tomorrow as they get out of school early.

Tech Club Day 4

This week in Tech Club we decided to go back to doing digital stories.  The students that had been working on them truly enjoyed the project and were getting a lot of experience working with the laptops.  This time we had mostly a different group of students.  It was nice to be able to share this project with more students.  We knew that we had this day and two more for the students to work on their projects.  It gave an ample amount of time for them to finish them if they wanted.  This week there was mostly boys and they all made their digital stories on an online game name Minecraft.  There was also a girl who had been working on her digital story for about 6 weeks at this time and her project was getting quite large.  The program kept crashing every time she tried to view the movie full screen.  She just learned to view it in the small window instead and that seemed to fix the problem.  We will continue to work on digital stories until we are done with tech club because the program coordinator and the children really like the project.