Again, I will have responses later on in the week. I've been working hard for the Ed Tech thing (I just finished for tonight) and I haven't read a single page of Mayflower today. Grr. So instead of me typing up a whole blog, I'm just going to copy and paste on here what exactly I was doing for the Ed Tech planning thing.
The assignment was to write a scenario about a day in the life of an 'Iolani student, teacher, parent, faculty, or whatever in terms of what I envision technology will be like and share it with the rest of the committee. I chose a student's view and I tried to include as much of 'Iolani student life as possible. This is what I came up with:
A day in the life of a typical ‘Iolani junior several years from now
My eyes snapped open and I glanced at the alarm clock on my bedside table. 4:42. Just three minutes before it’s set to ring at 4:45am. That means I only got 4 hours and 12 minutes of sleep. An “okay” night, according to my standards.
While I munched on my cinnamon toast for breakfast, I turned on my laptop/tablet and opened my personal organizer to check if I had time to chill before homeroom today. It’s only Tuesday and the week was already getting to me. My tasklist in the morning was easy enough: Print homework. Then at 7 I had a Fac Rels Indiv meeting. That leaves me…about ten minutes to chill.
I stuffed my laptop back in my school bag and got in the car, ready to go. At 6:45, I arrived on campus and went straight to the library. Some early birds were already at work in the computers. Almost all of them were working on iMovie projects and a couple were reviewing videos of yesterday’s lectures for some of their classes. I mean, of course, no one’s going to use those computers for printing. So I joined other students in the carrels with their own laptops. They were probably busy typing up the last few sentences in their papers and essays. Good thing I already finished my essay on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. All I had to do was open up my laptop and hit print. Or I could just turn it in electronically by dragging the file into Dr. Webb’s online “paper drop-off box.” Whichever, really.
I picked up my paper from the printer then headed down to the SAO. I opened up my personal organizer again on my laptop/tablet, as well as my Fac Rels Indiv Notebook. While I waited for Kendall and Rachel, I reviewed the notes I jotted down during last month’s project for Mr. Brasher. I also pulled up the picture of the final product on the same page so that we could refer to it again later on in the meeting while we evaluated the project. When Rachel and Kendall came in, they were both ready with their own tablets/laptops. We quickly “connected” to each other’s tablets/laptops and began to work.
Nothing much happened in homeroom today. I checked for any morning announcements. Earlier in the year, I had already tagged all that could possibly relate to me—speech and debate, cross country, orchestra, Imua, student council, etc.—so that only the notes and reminders on the daily bulletin that contain these terms would be sent to my own personal email account. Of course, I had to skim the daily bulletin just in case there were some that I missed.
I headed off to Señora’s class for first period totally psyched because we had another Skype session scheduled for the day. For the past couple of weeks, we had been getting to know some students at a boarding school in Barcelona and some students who attend a public school in Peru. Everyone in my class just loves being paired to another teenager miles away and having normal conversations with them in another language. I mean, nothing beats the kind of practice we get from talking to native Spanish speakers, right? Plus, my partner from Spain, Guillermo, is pretty cute.
I had a precalculus test today. I was kind of nervous about it at first because I couldn’t exactly follow Mr. Guillou’s lecture yesterday in class. Good thing that all the problems and examples that he showed us were recorded and uploaded onto his class website. I think I slowly replayed the problems step-by-step about a million times last night. It’s a good thing that I could pause the replays of the problems after every step so that I had time to digest what specific concepts Mr. Guillou applied each time. There was one problem that gave me a hard time though but I gave it my best shot. As I walked to my next class after the test, I logged on to Mr. Guillou’s class website. While we were taking the test, he had allowed all the students in my class access to the file with today’s test answers. I looked for that one problem that gave me trouble and…..yesss! I got it right!
Dr. Webb gave me back my paper on the definition of love using evidence from several of Shakespeare’s works. I listened to his comments through the podcast that was attached to the electronic paper that I had turned to him last week and made notes on my Shakespeare Notebook on my tablet/laptop about making sure to try not to have any Keables errors for my next paper.
On my way to APUSH, a note popped up on my laptop/tablet saying that I had to see Mr. Brown during my free period. Uh-oh. I hoped I’m not in trouble. Before entering my history class I quickly sent a reply saying that I received the notice and that I would certainly go to see him. Today’s class was intense because we had a mock trial for Andrew Jackson. Last night, our prosecution team all connected through a “network” that allowed us to research independently, chat with each other and share and work on documents, pictures, etc. all in one place. We were able to discuss strategies and anticipate the attacks that the defending side might pull while we searched online for information that could help us. There was this textbook that I had found in the library last week that had so much info that we could use. But the problem was someone from the defending side checked it out of the library just before I went in to check it out myself. That book doesn’t contain a single piece of information that helps their side but I bet that they just planned to do that so that we would be at a disadvantage. But I digitally checked out the e-book version, so HA!
AP Phys B was the usual. The teacher basically let us loose to work on our lab. I’m glad that we all had our own laptops/tablets because if not, we would have spent half the time trying to figure out who got to control the mouse before getting started on the activity. Working with each other definitely makes things more fun to learn and it makes me more open to the concepts when someone my age helps me understand along the way. I think it definitely sets a different feeling or atmosphere inside the classroom when we’re allowed to make discoveries and connections about the concepts on our own instead of being fed information all of the time.
Sometime during the day, I got another reminder on my laptop/tablet. Apparently, cross country practice was cancelled for today for some reason. That means I can make it to orchestra practice today. Sweet. Ms. Hafner’s been kind of upset that I had been missing some sessions because of sports so I gladly sent her a quick message and told her I’d make it after school. She replied with a smiley emoticon that looked like it was jumping for joy.
I finally figured out what to draw (or at least the source of inspiration) for my next drawing project. It happened right after the lunch bell rang. The trade winds were doing that cool trick over in the Center Courtyard again where all the fallen leaves are sucked into some mini cyclone and they swirl around and around in a small tornado of brown, orange and yellow. It only lasted for several seconds but, luckily, I had my phone with me so I snapped a quick photo and sent it via Bluetooth onto my laptop/tablet. I used it to inspired me as I worked on my sketch in art class.
The rest of the day was pretty much a blur. I went home, downloaded all of the assignments that I had to complete for tomorrow from all of my class websites and began homework. It was gonna be another long night.
End of scenario
Okay, gotta go squeeze in as much reading as I can. Byeee....
--Fruity
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