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.

Capstone Ninja Training

Today in Felipe and Eliza's room, our students showed us their mad computer skills as they put the final NINJA touches on their Capstone presentations.

• Briana was polishing up her photos for her portfolio.
  
• Seng was working on his speech for the luncheon, and then on adding backgrounds to his awesome hand-drawn characters.
• Thisa worked on polishing her layouts for her website to advertise her sister's photography.
• Danny was editing a video and sound for his group video project.
• Antonio worked on his speech and on adding to his portfolio website.
• April was making new designs for tatoos.
• Laura was working on her website for her club and learned to splice images in Photoshop.
• PaoChoua needed a bit of prodding, but then was working on his character combat story using Illustrator.
• Ruben, wrote a good speech for next week, and he got a slow start working on his project, but then he started working on his website layout. He discovered he had not saved a file correctly and had to start again.
• Gabriela also wrote her speech, and then she was working on a webpage design--and it looks great!
• Seng's speech was well written and then she, too, worked on her web design.

Overall, everyone made progress today and should have something to show at the luncheon that they can be proud of . . . and the world will no longer doubt our NINJA computer skills.