October 1, 2013

“I know I felt that thing up to an illicit degree. I mauled that coffee table.” (A blind man looking for a phone)

Today started off kind of boring but slowly became quite busy. A lot of my morning was spent working on my MAP spreadsheets. The only thing I have left are adding the the mean, median, and standard deviation for all the subject areas of the tests. My reprieve from this was second grade reading centers. The first round went relatively well because I had a big group but they were broken into groups of two and that was much easier to handle than a group of six kids.

I took a break after that group to go back to the lab to help the first graders log in. I found out yesterday with the other first grade class that they all pretty much forgot how to log into the computers after the three weeks of MAP testing where the computers were already logged in. The class today was no different and it took quite awhile to get them all onto the computer and then logged into Odyssey.

By the time I made it back to the second grade room the second round of groups only had about five minutes left. I kind of lucked out on that one because my second group was the one that is kind of a pain in the butt. And they proved it when I tried to switch them over from playing a match game to writing sentences. It was far from successful.

During one of the groups one of the kids walked by me, flipped my hood up on my head, and said “No hats in the building” as she walked away. It was kind of funny.

When I got back to the lab the first graders were still there. They decided to stay longer to compensate for spending most of their actual time trying to log in. And I was okay with this because no one else was on the schedule to come in.

After clocking back in from lunch I was standing near the entryway, waiting for the kindergarteners to walk by, when one of the secretaries asked me if I was busy. And I wasn't so I took on the project of downloading the new student pictures and updating their picture on Infinite Campus. When I followed her into the office to get the CD my friend/manager from the theater was there signing in. She's in Education or was in Education or something and she was there doing whatever she was there for. I saw her later with one of the sixth grade teachers so maybe she is just observing or something. I don't know, I'm just saying I saw her.

Uploading the pictures didn't take very long so I started messing around with the software on the CD because it is supposed to allow you to set up seating charts and class directories and other stuff. So I'm going to look into it and see if it is worth doing.

While working on that the librarian needed help changing one of the paras passwords so I went down to the library to have a look. She was doing everything right but it ended up being a compatibility issue with the browser. And then right when I got back to the lab a third grader walked in with a note from his teacher so I went down to her room to see if I could figure out why her Wordle wasn't printing. I couldn't. It was probably another browser issue. I think last year there was a problem with Wordle and one of the browsers. But I didn't think about that until right now so I might need to look into that tomorrow. I went back to the lab and tried it there and it worked so I ruled out the problem being with the website. After school we made sure it wasn't a wireless issue and then I ended up screencapping the Wordle, cutting it out in Paint, pasting it in Word, and printing it out. So it wasn't a total loss.

Today was the first day the kindergarteners tried Odyssey and it went about as well as could be expected. Which is to say it went pretty poorly. A lot of them didn't make it past the first thing because they kept clicking back or closing it before they finished it so they kept having to do it so it was register as being complete. Some of them never managed to finish it. There were also a lot of kids getting bored, mostly the kids who couldn't stay with it long enough to finish the first thing and move onto the next. For the older grades, when assignments are added in manually, the teacher can lock them so there is only one assignment clickable at a time. The next one will unlock when the previous one is finished. This would be nice for kindergarten because everything is unlocked, and they have a tendency to just click around and look for stuff that seems fun, instead of actually going in order and learning stuff. It gets annoying pretty quick trying to keep more than twenty kids on track. It's like spinning plates.

On my way home I stopped by my bank where I have a credit card to check on when I would be getting a new one. The one I have now expires this month and I think with my debit card it usually comes at least a month or two early. I guess with my credit card it comes in the middle of the last month. That makes sense I guess but my phone bill will be due before then and Ting apparently thinks my card has already expired. So I don't know if I should leave it as my payment method and see if they'll still charge to it or if I should switch to my debit card for this month and then go back to my credit card next month. I don't really want to risk a late payment.

When I got home I downloaded and played a little bit of the Battlefield 4 beta. I say a little bit because it is living up to the beta moniker. The Quick Match feature wasn't working and the Server Browser option showed all the servers as empty. When I clicked on one of those empty servers I got into a game and there was one teammate there too. After awhile a few more people popped up and eventually there were a couple enemy guys so we messed around for a bit and sometime later the server filled up and we had a decent game going. This was good until dinner but when I came back I wanted to try the other gametype and I kept getting put into a game by myself. Domination takes place on a smaller map and it was fun running around for awhile but it got old pretty fast. I would have had more fun alone on the larger map so I could mess around with the vehicles and maybe work on my helicopter skills.

I gave up on Battlefield 4 after awhile and switched over to Terraria. I created a new character and it is kind of rough going back to the beginning. I like being able to fall and not take damage or use my vine thingies to reach higher places. I'll get there eventually. Tonight I built a basic house and did a little bit of exploring. Scenery-wise the game does look quite a bit better but I think I'll need to put in a lot more time before I get to experience all the cool new stuff.

Tomorrow will be an all new day, looking very similar to this one, but I am going to go to bed now so I can check it out.