Sayonara Vacation ... It's Been Fun

And so it ends ... sleeping enough ... lounging around and reading books ... doing puzzles .... thinking about teaching and what to change/fix/keep/do next semester ... not-enough-movies ... lots of visits with friends ... All sorts of vacation goodness (well, except for the lack of good matinee-going opportunities).

I played around with making videos for TeacherTube for my computer programming class. I like the fact that they review the uploaded videos first before they allow them to be activated. I don't like the ads that are shown on the videos, but I guess it's a necessary evil. I do like that you can skip the ads after 5 seconds or so.

I'm trying to improve my Haiku website for the APCS class, and I was including links to various topics. I couldn't find short, to-the-point videos of what I wanted, though, so I made some. Let's see if I can keep it up. I also had a hard time finding enough resources for QUICK, easy-to-read sites on the specifics of Java programming. For some topics, there are great things I've found, but for others, I guess I have to search a bit harder. We do have a textbook, but I don't like the style. Sheesh. Picky, picky. Oh well, it's fun scanning things and seeing how others do stuff and picking and choosing what I want to create. And as ever, always feeling like I'm not going fast enough, and we're not going to cover all the AP stuff, and they're not going to understand stuff deep enough. Oy! I guess that's the plight of the first year you teach a class.

I have one "non mathy" assignment I'm going to give my seniors the first day we get back. It's their Spring semester, and they're seniors, and as a school, we're piling some more things on them, and I know they're going to be stressed. I've also noticed that the Ambigrams my geometry kids made last semester that they put on the classroom ceiling tiles STILL have various students looking up at them. So. I'm going to give each of my seniors (well juniors and seniors because it's in one class), a 12x12 card stock sheet and they have to decorate it and give one idea on stress relief. Something that's quick to do or something they've found effective or what not. I'll put some other requirements on it, but that will maybe be some source of help to other kidlets when they get overwhelmed in the next few months. Or .... I'll just have a nicer ceiling to stare up at myself. Win Win.