Friday, March 7, 2008

Number 17

Sunset Santa Cruz Island January 13th 2008 A Q Viers Photo

Progress is happening. Several hundreds of dollars have been spent to increase and update the library's multicultural fiction collection used extensively by 7th grade social studies classes. American Studies has been given sets of classic literature; primarily Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and H. G. Wells "The Time Machine". A grant to cover a substantial portion of the cost of a new workstation for the library annex has come from the PTSA (following last year's even larger grant for a similar machine). These machines are a huge boost to the Publication classes' efforts to complete the first-ever video yearbook and the best-ever 8th grade graduation movie.
PTSA, we appreciate your support.

Beyond great cash the PTSA is also providing volunteer library supervisors so we can keep the facility open during 6, 7 and 8th grade lunch time Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This is a good thing, especially when it is rainy and cold out.
The new PTSA hardware is also making it faster and easier to produce That LMS Friday Show which is now at show number 8. This Publication class production is distributed on DVD's to 7 or 8 classrooms across the grade levels. The compilation of the show segments and the burning of the disks would have been slow to the point of impracticality without the upgraded workstations.

My 6th grade class is currently doing a survey of the Digital Learning Commons web site and each student is taking a resource and reporting out to class on that resource using keynote as a presentation support. These presentations should occupy the class for all of this week if the past autobiographical keynotes are an accurate guide.