After arriving in Dominica yesterday (July 17th) and getting somewhat of a good sleep last night - it was nice to get down to work. That's why we're here!
We arrived at the Roseau Grammar School (all four of us) and the timing couldn't have been better - as Abraham Durant arrived at the very same time. Abraham had the security officers locate the keys to get us into the computer labs located on the fourth floor. Turns out, today was to be a 'hodge podge' kind of day.
Today and tomorrow, the students that Rachel is going to work with at the Teacher College are completing their last two days - so she'll have a later start. By Wednesday, this group will be back to starting at 8:30 am.
As for us at the Grammar School, few teachers were showing up. Finally by 9:30 am, we started working with the few teachers that were presented. We set out by working with creating a Gmail account and then the teachers were to work collaboratively with a partner on a shared Google document.
We had a break at 10:30 am for a sandwich and juice. When the break was over, we had a significant increase in the number of teachers. So Karen took the group that we started working with and continued work with them in one room. Bev and I took the newcomers and the plan was to cover with them what we did with the first group prior to the break. But there were issues in regards to the technology - it was behaving very inconsistently. It got to the point where no one could create a new gmail account. We were hoping to have all the teachers do this as I know that I wanted to do a bunch of things using Google Docs. If this morning is any indication, this will not be an option to pursue with the teachers this year. This is too bad as Google Docs some 'cloud-based' options - oh well, we'll continue on with plan B.
As a result of this, Bev and I moved along by working with the blog site 'Wordpress'. We eventually got all the participants registered on Wordpress and we had them:
generate a blog
make a post
insert an image
change the appearance (theme) of their blog
Considering the issues we had with the technology and teacher arrivals - we covered a pretty good start to the Dominica Project.
We arrived at the Roseau Grammar School (all four of us) and the timing couldn't have been better - as Abraham Durant arrived at the very same time. Abraham had the security officers locate the keys to get us into the computer labs located on the fourth floor. Turns out, today was to be a 'hodge podge' kind of day.
Today and tomorrow, the students that Rachel is going to work with at the Teacher College are completing their last two days - so she'll have a later start. By Wednesday, this group will be back to starting at 8:30 am.
As for us at the Grammar School, few teachers were showing up. Finally by 9:30 am, we started working with the few teachers that were presented. We set out by working with creating a Gmail account and then the teachers were to work collaboratively with a partner on a shared Google document.
We had a break at 10:30 am for a sandwich and juice. When the break was over, we had a significant increase in the number of teachers. So Karen took the group that we started working with and continued work with them in one room. Bev and I took the newcomers and the plan was to cover with them what we did with the first group prior to the break. But there were issues in regards to the technology - it was behaving very inconsistently. It got to the point where no one could create a new gmail account. We were hoping to have all the teachers do this as I know that I wanted to do a bunch of things using Google Docs. If this morning is any indication, this will not be an option to pursue with the teachers this year. This is too bad as Google Docs some 'cloud-based' options - oh well, we'll continue on with plan B.
As a result of this, Bev and I moved along by working with the blog site 'Wordpress'. We eventually got all the participants registered on Wordpress and we had them:
Considering the issues we had with the technology and teacher arrivals - we covered a pretty good start to the Dominica Project.