Teaching Middle School Science

I know, I know.  Every one in the blogosphere probably knows this, but I am in the Web 2.0 wilderness and considered very high tech cause I have a LCD projector.  I was able to attend the Pod-casting summit in Louisville, CO and all of a sudden i pods went from contraband to teaching tools.  Wow, these things are neat!  Because I have great technical support, I was able to get a i pod classic (Thank you Jeff,  Thank you Devonee) with 80 GB memory.  My network drive has 500 MB, as the nice people at IT are constantly reminding me.  If you added up all the memory of all the computers I owned before this one it doesn’t add up to 80 GB.  Not to age myself, but my first personal computer was an Atari and it was a computer not a video game, but it did come with Dig Dug! 

The conference showed many clever ways to use the i pods, although I did feel like the odd man out, as I had never used an i pod, and I didn’t have a laptop.  I was actually writing things down. The others at the conference were friendly enough, but in that distant way you are kind to animals and the village idiot.

 Anyway now I am on a mission to use this great resource and with all the zeal of a new recruit I am trying to gather the tools I need.  So if you have suggestions I am all ears.  How can I get the files to my kids?  I know about i store, and plan to use that, but how can I give a kid a video of the notes they missed from my school computer ?(it is a PC) The best I have so far is to use the i pod as a disk drive, go home, take the file off, put it in i tunes and load to the i pod.  Seems like a lot of steps, but I think I will be depending on students personal devices for a while, and you can only sync to one computer.

 So today I finished my training for giving CSAP, the textbook adoption committee, wrestling practice and meeting with my student teacher and her college evaluator.

 I was happy to see so many high school teachers advocating for the program they thought best supported students. There were three different programs, and the district is going to be uniform across the district so some are going to be disappointed, but every one was professional and offered honest opinions with out attacking.  I wish I felt as good about political candidates.

 As a middle school teacher I learned a bunch about the programs for 9-10.  And since we are registering our 8th graders I was very interested in the differences between the schools.  my team is improving rapidly, but with only 20 wrestlers, 4 of which are 110 lbs, I doubt we will dominate the tourney.  I actually found the presentation on CSAP to be funny.  Mostly at the things we have to do to insure security.  I kind of get it, I think I remember hearing about CSAP tests posted to the Web the day the first test started.