9 Objects of My Isolation

We've been out of school since March 13 and most instruction is being delivered online at this point. As a teacher, I don't like it. For Elementary, maybe it's fun. I mean, you have 25-30 kids in your class and you are "their classroom teacher" so they spend almost all day with you (and have been since August). In high school, I have 130 students a day, so mine are with me for 50 minutes and have 7 other teachers to see daily. That's 8 sets of classroom rules/expectations and 8 different personalities (some who they click with and some who they do not!).

So, as part of my "alone time" I prepared (in honor of the instagram challenge), 9 Objects of My Isolation (using PhotoPea on a Chromebook, since I am asking my Photoshop kids to do one as well).

And, here's my explanation...

1. Top Left:  Puzzle! We worked on a 1000 piece puzzle at some point after the first week. Everyone in the family worked on it together from time to time. I ordered other puzzles, but after two weeks off, no one really cared to do them anymore. :(
2. Top Middle:  Zoom! I don't know if my students are getting tons of Zoom calls, but we do a faculty zoom at least once a week, department meetings by Zoom, FBLA officer meetings (and virtual interviews) with Zoom.. and I'm finally trying it with a class next week and hoping at least a few show up.
3. Top Right: Kitties! That's Pumpkin and Ollie. I have a feeling they wish we were all at work/school because they are probably tired of having people around constantly.
4. Middle Left: Wii! We pulled out the Wii again. We've mostly played Smarty Pants and Wheel of Fortune. I wish I had a working Balance Board, but it died in a flooded basement sometime in the last few years.
5. Middle:  My Girls! Though my kids are tired of being at home, it's been nice to see them every day and spend time together that we wouldn't typically get to spend, especially my senior daughter who moved into the dorms in August for college.
6. Middle Right: Meat! Okay, I just thought it was funny that after a week out, meat was hard to find. This was a pic from a day where I was excited to find two kinds of meat at one store!
7. Bottom Left: Road Trips! I mean, when you can't visit many places, you get in the car and drive. We've done a little roaming around.
8. Bottom Middle: Netflix! My oldest daughter and I watched all seasons of Kim's Convenience, a sitcom. Now I'm watching Scandal (crazy!).
9. Bottom Right: Scrabble! We've been playing board games quite a bit. Scrabble, Pictionary, and Telestrations, to name a few!

Hope your COVID break has provided you time to relax, learn, and spend some time with your family. But, I am sure missing my students!

No Illustrator? Try YouIDraw! (free)

Here's a 15 minute review/demo of a browser-based vector graphics editor/creator. The free version is limited, but when it comes to something similar to Adobe Illustrator that can be done on a Chromebook, this is about as close as I have found.

Tools you will see:

• Typical Move, Rotate, Skew
• Shape tools
• Type tool
• Hand tool

Panels/Features you will see:

• Layers panel
• Pathfinder (similar) panel at top of the screen
• Library (gradients are here, and it actually has objects and lots of shapes)
• Properties panel (where you can change fonts, modify fill/stroke, transparency and appearance panel type things, flip horizontal/vertical, and the canvas size/background color)
• Export button-- be sure to tell it to export OBJECTS and not entire Canvas if you want transparency

They have a pretty simple user guide, too-- https://site.youidraw.com/youidraw-drawing-user-guide.html

What's really missing-- (among other things)

• No knife tool
• No trace bitmap (you can insert images, though, and if they are SVG images, you can edit the paths, change colors, etc.)
• No good control over angles
• No Shapebuilder or other fancy tools
• Text path tools
• Ability (in free version) to export in anything other than PNG (transparent) and JPG

What it does that Illustrator DOES NOT do-- save to Google Drive!

Fantasy Photoshop Fun! What the Animal Project!

Some years, we do a compositing  project, which is a great review of using Selection tools, Layer Masks, and Adjustment Layers called the What the Animal project. Students must take numerous parts (four) of animals/insects and create a new one with some color adjustments.

Here's a video demo of me walking through this example one (you can download the PSD in the video comments on YouTube).

A few tips:  1) Make sure students sketch out an idea before they start as they collect the parts. It makes it easier to grade and helps them think about getting pics that are turned the correct direction, etc., to match.  2) Make them turn in a thumbnail sheet so you can see the images they started with (sorry, they will cheat and just find one already done online).   3) Make your own! They want to see what you come up with, too!

Video Link

Scoring Guide Link

Teaching Web Design... read on!

First off, my apologies for not being as present this school year. It's been a trying semester for me, for some reason. But, I wanted to give some updates for those who teach Web Design.

I revamped my curriculum and I'm still ironing out the details of how I want to do things, but I did create a TON of resources this summer to go with my materials. We also shifted to using Repl, a coding site, where students code in-browser. I can have them turn in projects through that, do bellringers, etc. It's working really well for us.

Here's a walkthrough video. I wanted to show you what it looks like and how to use with the kids. I will say that it always starts with a skeleton HTML file (with an embedded script that we delete), a script. js file (which we delete), and a blank css page. When I begin the class, I made the kids delete everything but the index file and then even all the content of the index file before we type everything in. At this point, they use the skeleton file and just make edits. But, you can drag and drop in other html files (if you drag in an index.html file, you will have to tell it to REPLACE the current one) and you can drag in image files from the computer as well.

I deliver materials (mostly just the links) in Canvas. I don't run it through modules or anything (yet, maybe eventually). But, here is a link to my bellringers file (which I add to as my kids need more practice). We do some of these whole class together to practice from the unit or they get 20 minutes to try to work on it and then we do it together. I don't grade any of them (I hand out stickers sometimes, though). We do a ton of practice, including self-graded practice quizzes I made on Google Forms. 

Links:

1. Coding the Web Textbook (Links to an external site.) (work in progress)
2.  Bellringers and Class Activities Packet

Self-Grading Google Practice Quizzes (Coding the Web)--

• Lesson 1: Basics (Links to an external site.)
• Lesson 2: Layout (Links to an external site.)
• CTW Complete It #1  (Links to an external site.) (1-2)
• CTW Complete It #2 (Links to an external site.) (1-3)
• Printable Coding Practice (1-3; do on paper (Links to an external site.) answer key on back)
• Lesson 3 (Links to an external site.): Lists and Entity Codes
• Lesson 3-5: (Links to an external site.) HTML Tags and Colors
• Lesson 4-5: (Links to an external site.) Styles
• CTW Spot the Errors #1 (Links to an external site.)
• Lesson 6: (Links to an external site.) (comprehensive): Classes
• Lesson 7: (Links to an external site.) Images
• Lesson 7B (Links to an external site.) (more): Images
• CTW Spot the Errors #2 (Links to an external site.)
• Lesson 8-9 (Links to an external site.): Comments and Links
• Lesson 10-11 (Links to an external site.): Layout and Tables
• CTW Complete It #3 (Links to an external site.) (1-11)
• CTW Spot the Errors #3 (Links to an external site.)
• CTW Block or Inline?

I did do a hand-coding quiz the other day... they were relying too much on guessing on codes and not looking it up (they are allowed a notes page for quizzes AND for work... and some weren't even getting them out!). We practiced hand coding every day for a week because it was driving me nuts. But, they are doing much better now.

Anyway, this is a rambling post today... but I wanted you to know 1) we all struggle, 2) you are not alone, and 3) here's a resource that might help you.  Oh, and if you managed to get this far... here are my "teacher recap" videos for my chapters, in case you need any help figuring out how to use some of the code.

Have a great weekend!

Barely Keeping My Head Above Water! Parent Conference Week!

Can I vent a minute? This has probably been the most stressful school year of my teaching career! My many preps, my daughter being a senior in high school, and trying to remember to write objectives every day every hour are testing my limits. I was in bed before 8 PM last night.

But, it's Parent/Teacher Conference week here at JHS. These early conferences are always a challenge. I have 120 students to remember and unless you are not turning in work, being a discipline problem, or you've struck me as wonderfully genius or polite, I may not really know your work habits (or name... ahem).

So, I like to ask my students to complete a conference form ahead of time. We take about 10 minutes of class time and students have to check their grade, note missing work in my class, respond to questions about their satisfaction with their grades and the course, and then I use this information when I conference with parents. It's much better than that standard... "Oh, who do you belong to? Jared... okay, he's in my second hour. Let me check his grade. 96, A. He's doing pretty well. No concerns. Good kid."

This also gives me feedback while I sit there for 7 hours. I can reflect on how I'm doing and how they like the course so far, so it's good for all of us, right? And parents always say that they like it, so it's good to keep those mommas happy! Occasionally, I change the questions up a bit.

Here's a link to my form (Google Doc). Feel free to File> Make a Copy and edit as your own. Good luck with upcoming conferences!

Jeans day? Casual dress? What do you think?

I bought a romper last week on Amazon. I don't really own "adult onesies" but I wanted to try to be trendy. So, I got one with a reasonable length and paired it with a little black vest thing. It is that "on trend" pattern so I'm cool, right?

Wrong. My 17-year old told me I looked like I was wearing PJs and my 13-year old just laughed at me.

Don't worry, I'm at school wearing it anyway. It's comfy!

So, as I am heading back to school (had ALICE intruder training yesterday) and everyone is still enjoying wearing their yoga pants and shorts to school, I reminded myself of my business teacher training days (bear in mind, I graduated college in 1997). Dr. Linda Wiggs, my business education adviser, told me that you could always find the business teacher in a school. She was always the most professionally dressed person! At that time, it was true. Typing teachers were known for wearing suits and heels (gosh, remember that? and pantyhose?!).

However, when I started my very first year teaching, I did show up that first day dressed to the nines. I was approached by my mentor teacher immediately, telling me that I shouldn't "show up" the other teachers by dressing up so much. I was personally offended. I mean, I'm the business teacher. The kids need to take me seriously, right?

And jeans days? I didn't wear them. I thought it was unprofessional. Honestly, I was kinda fat and they were uncomfortable anyway.

But, I do feel differently now. I still believe you need to dress up the first few days (or maybe even weeks) of school. Casual Friday, though, it's up to you. I wasn't always wearing jeans (moreso because I just didn't have a good comfy pair) but there was something that students liked about seeing you in a school spirit t-shirt on football Friday. And, on spirit days, I now go all out and participate when I can (you should have seen me on Jersey Shore day about 10 years ago!). I might not wear jeans on Fridays all the time, but I typically do wear a school spirit shirt so I'm not the one teacher who is in fancy dress on Friday.

So, going back to school, just remember that you always need to look professional and approachable. And, you need to support students when given that opportunity--wear your school football shirt (don't have one? Shame on you!) or FBLA t-shirt. It's such a simple token.

Don't overthink it. But, be sure you are always seen as in charge of the room. I'm short, so often heels are necessary or people can't even find me when they walk into my room. If you need to dress up to feel more in power, do it.  But don't feel like you can't dress down when given permission.

But, don't wear pajamas.

Easy Google Form Breakout and Some Tools!

I've created "digital breakouts" for a few years now. Some are super complicated and take nearly an hour to complete (and sometimes few students even complete them) and I love the idea of them, but it's just so time consuming. Even the cool "breakout boxes" are just sometimes too much work having to program locks, set up the room, etc.

So, here is my "easy Google Form" breakout method. I created this as a Business Law bellringer activity for this year.  Between the tools I used and the setup, I thought this might be helpful, or if you actually teach Business Law, feel free to use it in your class.

I didn't create this list, but someone shared this resource with lots of tools for using in breakouts (like the Jigsaw Puzzle). Check it out!

My Breakout

My Presentation Mentioned