The Seniors' Last Day at ITA

Today is the last day the seniors will be in a session at ITA. It seems like the year just flew by!

We had an interesting day. We spent a lot of time talking about things to help make the transition to college easier. The students all wrote a blog to share some advice for next year's seniors. We also talked about some of the ways going to college teaches you more than just school information, but how to navigate the bureaucracy of the university. Then AJ came in and talked to students about what kinds of jobs are available while they are in college, at ITA, and what kinds of things they can do with the technology training that they already have.

Congratulations, Seniors, and Best Wishes!

I am pleased to present to you . . . the Seniors . . .

Although many students were absent today, we worked for the first hour on our presentations. Some seniors chose to present their projects to their fellow ITA students. Those who wanted to present (April, Tenzin and Briana) made short powerpoint presentations and sent them to Eliza. Then they went in to Ann's room to rehearse for the presentation this afternoon.

Meanwhile the other students continued to work on their projects.

While the seniors were working on finishing up their Capstone and Showcase projects, many of the Freshmen came in to the lab to keep working on their Behind the Wheel projects.

During Community Hour, April, Tenzin and Briana gave impressive presentations. Tenzin encouraged next year's seniors NOT to mess around for the whole year like he did, but he showed an impressive website made with Google sites. He is planning on becoming a registered nurse practitioner. April talked about her tattoo designs and explained why she chose the initials she did and why she put them in the order she did: ABL for April, Brenda and Laura, and she likes that is spells "able" because she wants them to be able to keep their friendship strong even though they are graduating and going in different directions. Briana showed some of the photography that she has done. They all did a great job.

Impressive!

5.8.10 Blog Entry

As the senior capstone class winds up for both their semester and their careers as ITA students, many took the time to construct powerpoint presentations to show off at community hour. The community hour presentations are short overviews of what the students have been working on all semester. So while a minute or two does not adequately reflect just how much hard work most of the students have placed into these assignments, it gives the upcoming capstone students an idea of just some of the effort which will be required next year.

Some of the presentations will themselves be interactive...as Mr. Tenzin will be showing off some of the flash game he has been working on all semester. While in his words the project is only 85 percent finished, he is well on his way to creating a well-rounded game. Kiki shows off her flyers and brochures that she made for Students for a Free Tibet. The goal of he work with SFT was to update the look so as to appeal to younger audience members...mission accomplished I believe! Williams made new brochures for MEDIC and the Vietnamese Student Association and shows those off.




Amanda and Letara are showing off some of the great work they've done for AHANA.



Some of the most polished works I have ever seen have come from these two students, and I hope they've enjoyed the work process as well. Alex, Pari, and Brenda seems to have been working with Allied Co-op since time began, and I hope they realize just how integral some of the design work they have done for Allied will be in the future. If everything goes well, Allied will be using those powerpoint templates, website, and logo design for a long time to come.





Today there was no additional work done to their projects, and it was predominately a prep time for them to polish and submit. But, these students have put together some great work over the semester, and it was really exciting to watch them as they went through a very thorough and grueling collaborative process that hopefully will teach them about about college before they even get here!

Working On Presentations

Today the students worked on presentation and put all of their files into the Final Senior Capstone Folder on the Network dive. After two, Ann left to coordinate the talent show. Tony took over rest of the class. All of the projects are complete except for PaYing. She is still be a little off task even though she knows that she needs to finish her project. Kiki has been helping her. At this point, I think we need to set a deadline for herself.

Most of the students have shown no interest with certification. Next session, we need to think of an end of the year blog. As well as a back-up-plan as to how we want the students to use their time.

baby steps

Many of us will remember the wonderful film What About Bob?, where Bob learned the theory of baby steps: one little tiny step at a time keeps you from feeling overwhelmed. Well, today the Capstone seniors were applying the baby step theory to finishing up their projects. Unfortunately, a majority of seniors in Eliza and Chou's room were absent today, but those who were present worked diligently. Felipe generously stuck around for a while to help out with super techie questions, since Chou couldn't be with us today, and Eliza is known more for her creativity and curriculum design than techno-ninja skills.

Eliza showed a powerpoint she had made to help the students organize their presentations about their Capstone projects: Each project should have: a 30 second introduction where the student describes the initial question leading to the project; a description of methods including software used and steps taken to accomplish the goal; a report of results where the student will describe the project in detail, including any obstacles that were encountered; a final discussion/summary of the overall project, which includes a statement about where this project might lead the student to further research or interests in the future; and a moment to acknowledge the assistance of others.

The room was absolutely silent as every one of the students worked quietly on his or her own project, either finishing the Capstone, beginning the presentation, or working on past Certifications.

Students wrote brief blogs simply listing their accomplishments for today and then commented on the biggest obstacle they encountered while working on their projects.

March Madness: Senior Capstone Due

Today the senior capstone project was due today. March Madness was not a problem because most of the students had their project for the most part completed. Tenzin and Williams went to a Game Convention with Ryan and were not in class.

Ann started off the class with a Learn@UW survey of only two questions: what was one good comment you received and what was one good comment you gave. Shockingly, not all of the students had received good comments. Also, the students all said they had not been given the opportunity to give other students comments which lead into a good transition to the day's goals. The students started off with work time and then had a student review of each others project.

Amanda and Letara have finished their tasks for AHANA. The only thing that needs tweeking is formatting issues that will arise when the organization needs to have stuff printed. Their thank you cards are having issues in Word. Ann suggested them to use Illustrator but they did not take the advice. Maybe by next session the two will have the problem fixed.

The Wellness group has everything finished. Pari has the website complete and plans on keeping in touch with the group and acting as their web developer. Alex helped Pari for most of the day. Brenda continued to work on her PowerPoint.

PaYing is frantically trying to finish the yearbook. Ann told Kiki to help. Currently, the senior page and the junior page are complete. There still needs to be work done for the background of each page because the text is unreadable. Next session, I am going to have Kiki continue to work with PaYing who is done with her project.

3/20/2010 updates

B203
Danny, Jesus, Mark:
This group is wrapping up their project and is struggling on the small details. Naming the cd or just making a decision to finalize something.

Gabby:
Her site is coming along, Chou helped fixed up her layout and is now looking good for Eliza to give her some content to work with.

Sheng:
Same as Gabby, her site is coming along, her layout is completed along with some pages having working content.

Ruben and Mark T.:
They worked mainly on their showcase project today and has a good idea, but getting it together and tweaking it for elementary school students, may take a little more time.

Paochoua:
Showed up and said his flash files are now missing... Not much could be recovered or done but to try to start over rather than sit on what happened.

April and Laura:
They just kept quite most of the time and kept working. Questions were asked when needed and most of all from their project other than looking great is that they are relearning and taking photoshop to a new level that what was tough in class.

Thisa:
Her layout is coming along, most of the layout is completed and has started to put content on some pages. There are still some glitches in the layout that needs to be fixed.

Seng:
Worked quietly all day, and his hand drawing/colored Photoshop pictures are coming along just good. Not sure how much different files he's done with, but they are starting to look complete.

March 6, 2010

Status update for everyone in the class. With two weeks until all the capstone projects are due, the students were busy working away the class time. Here is a status report on the students, their current projects, and what they hope to accomplish by next week (besides finishing up their capstone)

Williams

- Williams has been put in a strange situation due to Medic being backlogged in work, and hence unable to schedule enough work for Williams to keep him consistently busy. However, Williams has provided some great support to both Pa Ying and Kiki in their own projects, and continues to help out on the other capstone projects while he awaits word from Medic.

Pa Ying

- Pa Ying is working as fast as she can on the interactive powerpoint for the ITA yearbook. During this class period, Williams helped Pa Ying snap photos of some of the students who have so far flown under the radar for getting their pictures taken! Pa Ying is currently trying to catalog the photos of the students from the classes, and getting the powerpoints together. Williams is also assisting Pa Ying in making the powerpoint presentations. By next session Pa Ying will have a rough generation of the yearbook, which should be very exciting!

Mr. Tenzin

- Mr. Tenzin was having some issues incorporating all of the separate flash files (main menu, etc. ) into one complete flash file. Once all the files are together, Tenzin needs to have a screen that will adjust the difficulty level for the player, which then requires actionscript prompts. Chou provided some assistance to Tenzin, and helped point him in the right direction as far as online resources which may better help him in his project.

Amanda and Letara

- Amanda and Letara were modifying a thank you card that Ahana would like to send out to some recipients. Some of the issues they have both been having with the format is because of the card itself being a fold over. Ann provided some great advice during the session, and hopefully that helped them both work out the particular problems.

Brenda, Pari, and Alex

What you see above is a final example of the webpage for the Allied Wellness Cooperative. After many iterations, this group has come up with a great design layout and the color scheme is distinctly sublime. These three have come up with some great designs since their project began, hopefully the Allied cooperative will agree!

Whistle while you work . . . ..

Just like the sprightly Seven Dwarfs, we've been whistlin' along working on gettin' stuff done.

Today:

Seng worked on editing his hand-drawn and scanned character images in Illustrator. I must say, they are looking awfully good. He is especially good at adding texture and background. He hasn't made contact with his faculty adviser yet because he never asked anyone for his adviser's email address, so we took care of that today.


Briana is on track with her photo portfolio. She, too, has not yet made contact with her faculty adviser (an oversight which will be remedied today).


April has been working hard on her tattoo designs, and she got some great feedback from her faculty adviser that should help her revamp her designs to look more like tattoos.


Mark doesn't have a lot done for his flash animation project and hasn't heard from his adviser, although he has emailed him twice. He needs flash on his computer at home so that he can work on his project when he is away from ITA.


Thisa is doing a great job on a website she is making, and she has been able to talk to her mentor via email.


Pao Choua has made progress on his flash animation game. He has met with his adviser, but he also needs flash at home so that he can work on his project outside of school.


Ruben spent quite a bit of time trying to access his files. He has done some work on his project.


Tenzin has made remarkable progess on his basketball website. He has stayed in contact with his adviser and seems to be very focused on making his website awesome.


Laura was working with her adviser for much of the class period, and seems to have been getting some great guidance. Her project is of advertising materials for Latino Nation is well on track.


Jesus, Danny and Marc were hard at work and making evident progress on their video project.


Overall, it was a busy and successful day.

Capstone Feb 6

We started with a brief Learn@UW quiz and noticed in the results that a far greater number of students had been working on their projects at home than what we saw in the results from the last session. Also, more students had been in contact with their faculty advisers. It does seem though like some of the ITA instructors have not contacted the student they are advising, which is a bit of a concern; even if the students are responsible for making initial contact and for maintaining contact, it is troublesome to think that their advisers might not respond. If the student can show that they have sent a second email and made progress on their project but they still haven't heard from their adviser, then we will have to step in and sort of push the adviser to respond.

In any case, Chou led a discussion on the results of faculty adviser meetings, how to better prepare for a meeting and what kinds of questions to ask advisers. We stressed asking specific questions and taking responsibility for the meeting. Those students who had met with their advisers reported generally good success.

The rest of the day was spent working on projects and blogging about progress.

2/5/10 Papparazi

The session started with the students taking a Learn@UW quiz. Ryan led the discussion and asked the students to share their comments with their mentors. All of the students had worked on their project at home since the last ITA session except for PaYing and Williams. Most of the students were shy to share their comments and suggestions about their mentors. Maybe the students were too tired after lunch to talk? Right after the Learn@UW quiz we went into work time. The students were working the entire period. There were very few questions asked. Ryan and Ann went around the room to ask the students about their progress. There were no major issues during work times.

Williams - Vietnam Health Project/Medic
Williams is done with his brochure design 1. He came into session thinking that he did not have any work to do. However, Ann found him another student Health Organization that needed a fl yer and brochure update. Since last ITA session, Williams did not check his e-mail and this news was at first a shock. Even though it was another project for him, he did not complain. For the entire period, Williams worked on the design of the flyer. At first, Williams had a very linear design. Ann and Ryan both talked to him about how to draw his audience in and prioritizing what information should be on the top versus the bottom. He is going to work on the brochure at home and e-mail it to Ann ASAP because the student organization needs the brochure before the 14th.

Tenzin K - Flash Game
Tenzin told Ann he was not having any coding problems with his game. He spent the entire period working, but it is unclear what he accomplished. For the last hour of class, AJ and Tenzin discussed his project. Currently his status is 80% complete.

Pari and Brenda - Wellness Center
Alex was missing today. Pari continued to work on the logo design and Brenda still worked on the PowerPoint design. Currently,

the students have not heard about the content of the website. Ann reminded the students that they need to start working on their website now! Pari took the PowerPoint permit test.

Amanda and Letara - AHANA

Today Amanda and Letara met with the co-chairs of AHANA. Both the yearbook and video group took an opportunity to capture this moment. The co-chair members were not expecting a crew of cameramen. The group spent the entire period working on updating the brochure. Ann has given the group another task of making Thank You cards and adding information to the student resource papers.

PaYing - Yearbook
PaYing is still having difficulty staying on task with her Yearbook project. Ann caught PaYing multiple times on YouTube and Facebook. She was re-naming photographs, but because the network was so slow it was not complete. PaYing needs to be reminded of her time constraint but she is still working for the most part pretty diligently.

For the rest of the period the students worked on their blogs. PaYing took the Operating System and Excel Permit Test. Pari took the PowerPoint Permit Test.

1/23/10 Work Time - Oddly Silent

The students took the Session 10 Learn@UW quiz as soon as they came into class. The instructors found out that three students were admitted into UW: Williams, Tenzin K, and Amanda. Alex and Pari were still not at class by 12:25, so Ann when upstairs to retrieve the students. During that time AJ reminded the students about the Spring Showcase upcoming due date on March 6th. After, Ryan went over the Learn@UW Quiz. From the results, of both classes only 10 out of the 17 students got a response from their faculty advisors. Only 8 out of 16 students worked on their project outside of ITA. Ann reminded the students that the due date of the project was on March 20th. The next Learn@UW question lead into the Faculty advisor discussion, so question 4 about how the students plan to finish working on their project was not discussed.

The brainstorm of the faculty advisor lesson was led by Ryan. He went to the white board and wrote two categories: Faculty Advisor and Students. While Ryan was writing on the board, Ann was typing on the PowerPoint Slide. Ryan engaged the students by forcing them to be specific with their responses to the questions and asked students throughout the class to participate. The overall discussion went extremely well, and the students understood that they have a responsibility to be professional with their faculty advisors as well as faculty advisors need to be timely about their response. This is the list that the classroom came up with.

Faculty Advisors
• A little bit of constructive criticism in ways to make the project better
• Say comments in a nice way
• Give you helpful advice but not give strict direction (no spoon feeding)
• Responding in a timely manner
• Organization
• Know the status of the students project – Blogs!

Students
• Multiple examples of the project (current version)
• Have questions prepared
• Need to lead the advisors because the students know what is really going on
• First question should be the real big problem that you have
• Prepared a structured agenda for the meeting
• Organization

Before the students had to work, they all e-mailed Jesus their response “My favorite part of the senior capstone was…” For the rest of the period, the students worked in almost silence (wE!rD!)

Williams:
Williams is currently working on a version of the brochure for Medic, and expects to have a rough copy available before the advisor meeting in two weeks. During this class session, Williams worked with Kiki to help her on his brochure in addition to placing photos into his brochure, making sure everything was properly formatted.

Kiki:
Kiki is currently working on another brochure in advance for an event to be held within a few weeks. Originally, her internship group wanted a flyer to be posted around the Madison area. But due to the depth of information about the event, Kiki suggested a tri-fold brochure. Kiki plans on completing the brochure by the end of this class period, and when she meets with her advisor in two weeks Kiki will have a layout for the webpage in addition to several versions of various flyers and brochures.

PaYing:
PaYing spent some of the class time on Facebook but for the most part was working the entire class period. PaYing is still having difficulties with how the yearbook should be. She is not very skilled at HTML and CSS and would have difficulties creating a website. Ann talked to PaYing about possibly doing a Facebook album instead. But after PaYing’s faculty advisor AJ discussed with PaYing about the time constraints, they have decided to create a clickable PowerPoint. PaYing took two permit tests today: Word and PowerPoint.

Amanda:
Amanda is currently working on a new project for AHANA. She is making templates for papers they will be handing out to students of their organization during a resource fair. The papers will be gradually decreased in size by ¾ of an inch so that you see an array of heading labels. Next session, she will be meeting with the student organization leaders Tiffany and Jazzmyne. Ann previously e-mailed that group the brochure and flyer template. The organization loved the work and now wants to tie up some loose ends on the brochure.

Tenzin:
Tenzin is currently stuck on his game project, and therefore spent the majority of his time during the period working on what he would like to do for the Spring showcase. Tenzin is working on flashcards that match a word with a definition, but is having trouble having the match register using Actionscript. When Tenzin meets with Chou in two weeks, he will have a list of questions about Flash in gaming, which will include the matching problem.

Brenda, Alex and Pari:

Brenda is currently re-working on the PowerPoint logo. Kevin Doran, their faculty advisor gave specific comments about the color contrast between the title slide vs. the content slide. Previously, the title slide and the content slide had a very similar color even though it was green and yellow. Kevin advised Brenda to make the green PowerPoint background to be more drastic.

Pari is currently re-working the logo design. Kevin thought the shell vaguely resembled an alien. Ann and Pari searched online for the shell he was trying to recreate. Together, they found that his previous design was missing a section of the cell. Now he is working in Illustrator to fix his design. Brenda is aware of this change and knows she will also need to alter her Powerpoint background. Pari took two road tests today: Flash and Photoshop.

Alex is re-working the brochure. Kevin suggested instead of using Publisher to use InDesign. Alex decided to use InDesign and he is starting over. Alex still needs to talk to Pari about contacting Susan about the content of the brochure.

Certification period went smoothly. The class was silent as students took road tests. Ann and Ryan graded the permit tests and road tests as they were submitted. Pari passed Flash and Photoshop. PaYing did not pass either of her Permit Tests. Ryan sent an e-mail to PaYing about re-taking the tests later in the semester after completion of her Senior Capstone project. Ryan also commented on the students blogs. All of the blogs were adequate but not excellent. The two students who need to completely re-write their blogs are Williams and Alex. New blog plans have been posted on the wiki.

1/9/10 New Year and New Faculty Advisors

Unlike last year, all of the seniors were present (in Ann’s class anyway). Ann started off the class with a Learn@UW quiz. Pari and Alex came in two minutes late so finished the quiz as Ann was discussing it. None of the seniors have heard back from UW, some of the seniors worked on their project over break, and only one senior had heard about the Chancellor Scholarship program. After the quiz, the students updated their Google doc with their faculty advisor meeting dates, project description, and PLC sign ups. For next session, there are four students who want to take permit tests and 3 students that want to take road tests. Instructors will need to plan accordingly with getting the necessary files. The students already had a dropbox created from the first session, so the lesson went very fast. Letara had some problems with her dropbox account, but for the most part the step-by-step activity went smoothly.

After this first activity, Ann gave the students their progress reports. Brenda and the video group did not understand clearly what Ann had written but they just came to ask her for clarification. None of the students seemed extremely upset with the comments.

Pa Ying did not seem interested in what Ann had written so she went over to talk to her and show the website she had referenced. This was the 2007 student photo gallery. Ann also showed Pa Ying the use of pre-made photoshop galleries. Pa Ying was very intrigued with this feature. She spent the rest of the class playing around with this feature.

Kiki is currently having issues with her non-profit group. The group is not responding in a timely fashion to her e-mails and she is getting extremely frustrated. The non-profit e-mailed her a .mod file to make a video and Kiki had to ask the group to convert it to an .avi so that she could edit. The non-profit group is not enthusiastic about making the change, so instructors may need find out a way to convert .mod to .avi. She spent all of the certification period working on her portfolio.

Tenzin today spent the entire period working on his portfolio. He updated his projects and expanded more on his explanation.

Williams just worked on his Capstone project. (MEDiC) He started to type the information on his brochure. It should not take him more than next period to finish everything. He e-mailed Farah but did not get a response back. There may be a new contact person Williams will need to talk to but he is currently unaware of any changes.

Brenda, Alex, and Pari (who left early) all worked on their portfolios. Brenda is just making sure her design is sliceable. Alex updated the content of his portfolio. Pari was only here for 20 minutes during certification and he worked on creating the basic design.

Amanda updated AHANA’s new calendar and worked on the flyer template. Right now the group is having issues with Letarra’s time commitments. Today she left early but did not tell Ann  why.

All of the students wrote professional e-mails. Ann did not have to modify them too much. Instructors will need to contact mentors and make sure that the students actually uploaded files to the drop box. Also, the students were very committed to having good blogs. Some students stayed 10 minutes after class to finish their project.

A new year, a new day, a new hour

In the first new hour of the ITA year, the afternoon started with Chou being in the room instead of  Felipe. They said they are changing rooms for the rest of the year. We started on a typical Learn@UW quiz.

Eliza reviewed with the class information about their projects and which mentor each student was assigned to. If students forget, they can find any information they need on Google documents using their Gmail account. Students went into the g-document and inserted all their project information, email, blogger site. On this same g-doc spreadsheet, on a spreadsheet tab, they can set up meetings with their mentors to go over what they want to do or help with their project ideas. Students are to have at least 1 meeting during lunch with our their mentors this semester.

We went on to reviewing how to use the Dropbox program. It is a really useful program that acts like a flash drive, and keeps your files saved on an online server. This program we can install on multiple computers and as we upload and download files into it, it updates on all the computers at once. But because this is an online space that the files are being stored in, students can invite other users to share and see the files or folders that are in the Dropbox space. Students were to invite their mentor to their folders where they had stored their project.

Some notes to keep from the first hour:

1.  My Dropbox should be up to date at all times, because mentors will be checking in on our projects to help prepare us and see the progression.
2. I should keep in contact with my advisor and take responsibility for the meetings.

*** Break Time***
Students sat around the computer, surfing the web... Chou came around looking at bags doing a search, because there was a missing laptop from the morrning and Excell wanted everyone to have their bags looked at.
*** Break Over***

Students were given the next hour or so--until the next break--to work on projects. Everyone was given an evaluation sheet that was done by Ann on our projects, and everyone stated to work.

Michelle came in and announced the MLK event and asked if anyone wanted to be an usher or volunteer to help out.

Then: work work and more work

*** Break Time ***
*** Break Over***

First thing Eliza had students do after the break is to email or advisor/mentor the first email with all the information about each project. Then students made sure all their updated work was uploaded to dropbox and finished up the day with a blog.