Learning

School's officially been out since last Wednesday, and the teachers' last day was Friday. I, however, have still been in school, because I have been doing

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT.

What that means is, I have been going to IN-SERVICE. Now, generally, in-service is a tactful way of referring to what one might otherwise call a TIME SUCK, or perhaps a COMA-INDUCING PERIOD OF BOREDOM.

Only, this time ... I learned something.

I KNOW!

For three days I have been in a computer lab, learning. The class was called Technology II, and it had a pre-requisite of Tech I or intermediate computer skills.

I kind of think the Tech I agenda looks like this:

Day One
8:00-10:00 ..... Finding and pushing the power button on the computer
10:00-11:30 .... Locating the letters on a keyboard
12:30-3:00 ..... Basics of Double-Clicking

Day Two
8:00-10:00 ..... Locating icons on the computer desktop
10:00-11:30 .... Choosing your login name
12:30-3:00 ..... Setting your password

Day Three
8:00-10:00 ..... How to look at an email
10:00-11:30 .... How to delete an email
12:30-3:00 ..... How to send an email

I am not kidding. There are people in my school who desperately need to take this class, and they are the same people who are always in my group when we have to do computer-related in-services. I could log in, retrieve my data, update my gradebook, send fourteen emails, and read the entire Randomville Times Online in the amount of time it takes some people to locate the power button (Day One, session one).

I'm not saying that there weren't people in the Tech II class who wouldn't have benefitted from a refresher course, but most of us did at least have a clue as to what we were doing, and the instructors were kind enough to give us notebooks, so I could read ahead and do other stuff whenever I finished a task.

My most exciting thing was creating an interactive powerpoint quiz. Here is a preview:*














Each answer is linked to another page.
If you answer incorrectly, you get this page:














And if you answer correctly, you get this page:















It wasn't hard to do, but it was time-consuming. I'm glad I got it out of the way now, because I probably won't do it during the school year.

We also learned about a whole bunch of stuff that either doesn't apply to me, personally, as a theater/reading teacher, or that doesn't apply to my school, which doesn't have these nifty little Jeopardy buzzers.

Also, we looked at clip-art, and I checked my email. A lot.

*I learned about the PrintScreen button. So that came in handy.