IMPACT Chit Chat Session 1

Our agreed upon meeting of Sunday at 3 pm proved to be a forgetful time for some. Out of the seven people assigned to the discussion group, three people showed up, only one of which was outside the MLS program. I suppose its no fault of the others; after all, they have not even bothered to post in the discussion board.

Let it be noted that it is rather hard to collaborate with people who have busy schedules or perhaps crappy internet connections, of which both reasons I understand.

That being said, the conversation between Tara, Audra and I was a tremendous success. Audra had actually implemented a project quite similar to our proposed logical model a few years back, in the same content area we were focusing on! It was good to hear of the difficulties and success of her project so that we could relate it to our own. Interesting to note is that in her school at the time they had a rather invisible SLMS who did not help much with the program.

It has been agreed that the logic model needs severe tweaking due to the nature of vocational courses in middle school. Not all students in the Social Studies course will have art at the same, and the same goes for music and technology courses because all the vocational classes switch every 9 weeks.

Thus, we will propose to our original logic model group the idea of still incorporating music, art, and technology into the Social Studies curriculum, but have the SLMS bring those parts instead of other teachers. There will still be collaboration (between the SS teacher and the SLMS, with content area teachers as vital resources), but I doubt we can make it work with other teachers if all the students are not in the same courses at the same time.

It will be relatively easy to incorporate all the same areas using technology. For example, the SLMS can introduce digital cameras and photoshop for art projects based on student's chosen country, teach them to download MIDIS for setting regional poetry to music, and incorporate PowerPoints and loads other technology.

The original logic model group has an assigned meeting time of this Thursday; this idea will be proposed and debated. We were originally planning on working on the worksheets, but of course the logic models need ironing out before we can address the benchmarks and such.