Janie's April Blog

April was very technologically challenging for me. On April 1, we took our Business and Marketing students on a field trip to Washington, DC. This is where my students did the second part of the digital project. We have a new tech person, so I was busy acquainting him with all of the technology in our building. I had five computers with the blue screen of death, so we were very busy trying to get them back up and running. We were successful with one. I still have four computers not working because after we fixed the first, our tech guy was out for emergency surgery. I got a new desktop with LEA funds, and I am still trying to get it set up because I do not have the administrative priviliges to connect to our network.
I left on April 14 for Greece for an EF tour. If your schools are not involved with EF, you should give them a try. We took 16 students and adults to Greece on an Athens and the Isles tour. We were four days on land and four days on a cruise. We also visited Turkey. This is where my students finished the third phase of my digital project. We literally took thousands of pictures. It was so difficult to decide which ones to use in our presentation that we must do in front of the Board of Education. As far as technology, count your blessings for what we have in America. They have very, very slow Internet service when you can get it at all. At our hotels, we could get Internet for 90 minutes for 5 euros. It took most of that time just to get connected. We then tried to Skype with our families back home because it was almost impossible to make international calls. It was very difficult to Skype because of the poor Internet connections. Some of the kids were able to use FaceTime on their Macs. That was the first time I had heard of it, and I found that it is exclusive to Macs. Then when we got on the ship, the cost was 20 euros for one hour of Internet service. So we decided it was not worth it to even try. We were really so busy touring, shopping, and climbing volcanos that we didn't have much time to use our computers. It made us appreciate the Internet service we have at home. This was a great educational experience for the teachers as well as the students. I think the greatest impact on our students was how little our dollar is worth compared to other currency. This was a great educational experience for both teachers and students.
When I returned, we concentrated on preparing our students for the upcoming CTE Performance Assessments and WesTest. Our CTE Director purchased headsets for all the computers in all of our labs, so that was a nice addition. They will especially be helpful for KeyTrain. For the rest of the month, I continued working on my wvlearns content, and I signed up for the WebTop class that many of us will begin tomorrow. I can't wait to see all of you again. Many of us are thinking about attending FETC again next year. I hope you all will join us.