Number 22

Old military housing Angel Is.

View of the City from the top of Angel Is.
pictures courtesy R. Emerson

Bumpy road at Langley Middle. Still sorting out the workable and the not so much. Computing remains choppy particularly in regard to the online yearbook site where we are supposed to build the book; connection is slow and unpredictable. The theme of the book is as yet unestablished and in fact there are no real ideas although we have taken a couple of runs at brainstorming one up.

5 new computers have arrived for library and general use. We really need 10 times that number of new student workstations but all indications are that we are not going to be getting much until after the first of the year.

On the bright side new textbooks for English/Language Arts are here or almost here and they will provide some shiny new opportunities for reading and writing instruction once all hands figure out how to integrate them with existing resources and teaching styles.

My English 8, sometimes known as Humanities 8, students and I are finding our way into the American colonial era with the novel Johnny Tremain. We will be sharing personal Life Graphs this week in preparation for creating same for the main character in that story. We will also be selecting a non-fiction book this week to get another point of view on that time period. And we will be adding another post to the student blog either as a free write activity or a response to the reading, or maybe if we can find the time, both.

Speaking of blogs, the Publication class work group that is responsible for The LMS Weekly blog site may go live by Friday with their first edition. I will post the web address when the creators let me.

The other Publications groups, Video Yearbook and Video Productions, aka That LMS Friday Show are still struggling to find their footing and dealing with time and technology issues but the first Friday Show will happen this week one way or the other. Video Yearbook is of course a long term project with no product until May, hopefully they can finish before that and go on to something else by early next year. Publications really needs to be a two hour class and I am going to propose to the members that they need to put in some time outside of class, before school, at lunch or after school, if they want to produce quality work. Also as they learn the ropes of digital production they will get more efficient and faster.

Ramona, my daughter, who recently moved to San Francisco, did a little documentary project on Angel Island in SF Bay which is the destination for the LMS Adventure Education classes' Spring trip. We have pictures of the ferry from downtown out to the island and shots of the campgrounds, views of the city, old military installations (think Fort Casey with more sun) to get the kids excited about the prospect. Next she will try to figure out a public transport method of getting to the Point Reyes National Seashore from our basecamp on Angel Island. Or she will get a job and we will have to figure it out for ourselves.

Until next time...

Number 21

Langley Sea Wall (photo Marc Smith)

Highlights of the first (short) week of school, aka Thursday and Friday, September 4th and 5th:
Amidst a chaos of not-quite-ready-for-prime-time computers Bergquist's American Studies Blocks (1st and 2nd period, 5th and 6th period) were able, virtually to a man, to create both Gmail and Moodle (online course website) accounts. The kids, in other words, showed real problem solving skill given an authentic problem situation; the more savvy stepped up to assist the less technical, motivation was high all round, it was messy, it was real. Fun for the adults? Maybe not so much at first but as one learns to roll with it and sees the kids really engaged it felt better.

My two classes, English 8 and Publications, proved to be inhabited by a nice group of kids as was the circulating assessment of this class from their 7th grade year. In English we kicked off with a possibly over-the-top extended metaphor lesson involving a chainsaw and a fairly hefty section of Douglas Fir trunk. This activity is under study as to its viability and future use. We listened to a reading of the letter to parents about the expectations and curriculum of this class which was emailed later in the day to nearly all parents. Friday we began the construction of a hand-made journal for general use throughout the quarter (we will make a new one at the start of each quarter) and simultaneously wrote a reflection on the first day of school on one of the, as yet, unbound pages of said journal.

In Publications there was a fairly lengthy discussion of the nature of this production class and the implications of same for the members of the class. This class lives or dies based on real business requirements like profit and loss and the degree to which we can meet the needs and satisfy the interests of our market, the students of LMS. On Friday the class formed small groups and took photos of objects around the school after a short introduction to some basic rules of good photography. The class is large for the kind of multiple simultaneous activities envisioned, its a logistic challenge, and will demand levels of independence and responsibility not yet fully developed in this age group. We hope to break into a yearbook group, a video group, and a blog group very soon with a rotation through these during the year.

Implementation of tech levy funding for student workstations has not picked up much steam as yet but I think we will start to see a significant surge in actual machines in front of kids sometime this quarter and after; we need this to happen because even our newest workstations are now over 5 years old. The majority of these beasts work but they do not work well and with 25 to 30 kids in a room, believe me, you do not need to be hand-holding the computers.

The new library management software known as Destiny from the Follett Corporation is working very well and will be working a lot better when the students are uploaded to the system.
Great potential for searching the LMS library, and indeed all the district library collections, from school, home, anywhere you have an internet connection, (cell phone?). Kids or parents can finally really search for the right print or web resource easily. The software also enables a top ten list of most popular books (most checked out by students at each school), pictures of covers, complete records for each title, summaries and the actual text of the first several pages of many books, and many other features, probably that I will discover someday not too far in the future.
Now if we can get a whole bunch of shiny new books and get those kids into the system we will be rolling indeed.

Seismic assessment is in and, I think, available on the district web page somewhere. That should be interesting reading.

Adventure Ed is, I think, on track for Washington Coast Hike, Santa Barbara/Channel Islands, San Francisco/Point Reyes, Washington Coast again, with a Mount Pilchuck day hike in there somewhere, during the next two semesters.
Stay tuned.