Thursday, March 22, 2007

Another Providence Presentation

This is a presentation by another Providence student. This was filled with impressive effects and music which were unfortunately stripped from the show.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Providence Campus Project

Here is our first submission from Providence Campus.
This is the work of Silvio S. an eleventh grader. Unfortunately, while slideshare.net is an excellent free hosting site, it strips all of the effects and timing from the student power points. These look good on the blog but you are only seeing a static slide. When we view these on the projector they are even more impressive!

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Black History Project #2

Here is another Narragansett student's black history .PPT. Let us know what you think about our projects! Hopefully we will be posting some from Providence in the near future.

Computer Room & Carts



Here are a couple of pictures of our computer lab and one of the carts.
See how nice and neat the power cords are in the cart in the above picture?
Believe it or not, even though I numbered the shelves (and the corresponding computers) if the students put the computers away unobserved the cart will turn into an absolute Gordian knot of chaos!
I also like the cart keys because it looks like you are setting the launch codes both keys need to be turning to gain access.
Each student is issued a certain number on both cart one and two. That is then the computer they use each and every time.
More Power Points are on the way.

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Black History Powerpoint 1

I will be posting some of our students' power points here as part of the EDU 921 assignments. I will ask other students to comment on presentations and possibly to explain why they chose the historical figure they did their project on.
I (we) are using www.slideshare.net to host our power points.

Monday, March 5, 2007

How Our Students Use the Computers


Our computer policy at Ocean Tides is somewhat limited/restricted. We use a very strict web filter which even blocks many of the blogs we are assigned to read for this class. I don't know how it decides what to block. Our resident students are adjudicated, therefore they are not allowed to access emails or any type of social networking web site. This presents challenges to my integrating this blog into classroom assignments. I have been working with our network server team to figure out how we can address this.
Here is what we are currently doing:
We have a computer lab with eight computers. We also have twenty-four laptops which are divided into two carts (we call them cows) of twelve computers each -one cart per floor. This provides for enough time and resources that each student is guaranteed some personal computer time throughout the semester.
In order to prevent "digital mischief" (of the type where another student's work may "accidentally" be erased by another student) each student is assigned 1 gig of space in a personal folder on the Ocean Tides server. In order to access this folder the student must log in with their name and personal identifier (it is the student's school ID # to prevent passwords being forgotten). Anything they save automatically goes into their folder. Each teacher then has their own log in name and password access to the network from the teacher's computer. In other words we can open the students folders from our desks and put in comments, personalized tests and projects and we can also check progress on tasks.
This sounds wonderful and secure but as the internet expands and creates ISP filters/bypasses (vtunnel for example) vigilance is still required when the students use the internet.
This system is new and we are just discovering wrinkles and ruts that we are trying to smooth out.
I will take pictures later this week to show the cows and lab.
Tomorrow is career day and I have a lot of organizing to do!