I took the week off last week to work on VBS for church, so I didn’t have time to post anything. I’ll be online Monday though…
Our attendance was down from years past, barely breaking 400 kids at our peak. I guess that’s a lot of kids we should be grateful for having, but I always hope that we get improvement. I felt good in the fact that our teaching segments were more in-depth telling of Bible stories than we had done in years past, and many of the kids did a great job in retaining what they had learned.
Being there was helpful to me in writing the script to know what works and engages the kids and what doesn’t. Next year, I definitely want to include more audience participation. If you’re familiar with the fact that most learners are visual or kinesthetic, then you might understand my frustration with writing a script that was mostly verbal with joke-telling hitting the floor, but a superhero putting on green fuzzy frog slippers getting laughs.
My dialogue was also overly wordy, even with two rewrites, which probably frustrated the actors in memorizing their lines too. I’m thinking about putting together a lessons learned this year, since this was my first year of going alone with this, along with several new people in various other places in the program.
Anyway, I got to play The Hulk “Goliath”, tearing up sets and throwing props. It was fun until I jumped off the stage to chase after the superheroes and tweaked my knee. It’s been getting better since Thursday, but I guess I’m not in my ’20s anymore. How I can chase around toddlers is
Lots of stuff Monday, and hopefully a new class for my repertoire…
I’ve previously mentioned my participation in our church’s Vacation Bible School program, but I wanted to put this up here in case anyone in the area was interested:
If you live near the west side of Indianapolis and would like to have your kids attend a week of Vacation Bible School, my church (Ben Davis Christian) will be having ours from July 14-17. If you want to sign up your children (or grandchildren), go to www.bendavisonline.org
This year’s theme is “Jesus Is My Superhero” and is based in a comic book world. I wrote the script for the four days worth of plays that deal with how the superheroes we see in modern pop culture are probably not really the heroes that we think they are. Instead, we talk about some heroes in the Bible that the kids should learn from.
I’m not sure how much of that the kids will get… they’ll probably just go for the fight scenes and the web shooting and stuff, but it was worth a shot to delve into that with the Iron Man, Hulk, and Batman movies out this summer. And, yours truly will have a cameo at some point as a raving lunatic monster that rampages across the city. It should be a lot of fun, and it will be neat to see the kids react to it. I’ve missed the last couple of years I wrote VBS when we did the pirate theme and stuff, but I’m going to get to see the whole thing this year.
Anyway, if you’re interested, go to the link and sign them up. I believe it is free to register, but if you want to get your child a T-shirt, it’s something like $6 or $8 I think.
Well, I have no classes for the rest of the summer. I had to remove myself from the class I was to teach this month, and I spaced out on signing up for anything else. So, I’ll have to figure out something to pass the time here to amuse myself. Stay tuned for details.
Well, it looks like I have a summer vacation from school. Nothing scheduled through August, so hopefully I will become more diligent about posting here. Somebody must be reading this stuff, as I get comments and hits that continue to trickle in.
I’ve added a new section to the links called “Christian Resources”, which hopefully will be of help to you if you’re working on classes like the Old/New Testament Surveys or other Christian integration assignments.
Here’s your assignment for the summer: if you’re a student from the past three months that this blog has been in existence, won’t you drop a line? I am curious whether or not this site is of use to anyone or if I just have a lot of KEWL keywords that set all the spider-bots on the web in a frenzy.
Here is something from IWU regarding your myemail.indwes.edu email accounts. Previously, the university did not allow you to forward messages from your account for security reasons, but now you can have messages forwarded to your personal email accounts.
As a rule, instructors are now only provided with your myemail.indwes.edu email addresses by the university, and not your personal email addresses, and the university email addresses are the only approved method of communication for facilitators to use. If it is more convenient for you to email me with your personal accounts, I don’t mind that, but for emails to the entire class, I only use the myemail addresses. Your mileage may vary with other instructors.
Here is a reminder to students to use your email account with the myemail.indwes.edu domain name. The school no longer provides instructors with personal email addresses, so these are all I have to go by. If you haven’t signed up by now, contact Student Services for instructions. The instructions went out in the mail in March, so if you have not received them by now, then you should definitely contact student services.
I know that I have been extremely lax about updating the last couple of weeks. It’s a combination of several projects coming to a head all at once. However, here are a few things to look at to keep your interest in the meantime:
Ten free security utilities you should already be using from ZDNet: your mileage may vary on these applications, but you might notice some topics that we covered in class, such as drive-by downloads and “crapware” that comes pre-installed on computers by the manufacturer.
Blockbuster sued for participating in Facebook’s beacon program: Facebook has a program that monitors and tells your Facebook friends about your e-commerce activity. In the case of Blockbuster, they tell your friends what videos you rent, which is a no-no according to the Video Privacy Protection Act, which was enacted after Judge Robert Bork’s video rental history was published during his Supreme Court nomination in 1987.
Computer hacker hits Advance Auto: It’s not just banks and credit card companies that are getting targeted by hackers. One wonders, though, why they still had information on file that was 7 years old.
If you’ve noticed, I changed the name of the blog this week to the “YourSpace Project”. You probably get the famous web site that the name comes from, but I changed the name to better reflect the purpose of what this site is all about: additional content related to topics we’ve discussed in class, an online class repository of information, and a place for you to discuss and ask questions about various class topics. In the next week or so, I’m going to send the URL out to all my old classes and ask them for input. Now that I’ve got about two months worth of content under my belt now, it will be interesting to see what their perspectives are on all this now that they have actually completed most of these courses.
I cleaned up the links to the left, and added arrows so you can tell everything apart. The WordPress style I am using crams everything together, unfortunately, so I needed to invent something to make it more readable. Hopefully they will add some space between links or some sort of bulleting function in the future.
I’ve also added a link to the Threat Level blog run by Wired magazine. They cover online privacy and security issues, as well as politics and use (or perhaps abuse) of the Patriot Act. I know I say it a lot, and it probably sounds trite at this point, but I find these issues fascinating, and you try to become as well-informed about these subjects as you can. After all, you are just a number to your bank, and so is your bank balance. They have no way of knowing whether you really, truly have $10,000 in there or -$.10, and you need to be aware of what bad guys do online to protect yourselves.
I’m also hoping to get back to the “bad PowerPoint” subject we were discussing in the COM 110 class I taught last month. There are some more interesting avenues to explore there, and I hope they can help you as you develop your own presentations throughout your cohort program.
As we discussed in class the other night, there are some changes made to the homework this week. Please note the following:
The “PowerPoint Presentations” Excel case assignment on page 158 is no longer the homework required for Workshop 4.
The new homework due for Workshop 4 is the “Theme Park Admissions” practice exercise on p. 150. Please verify that you have completed all the steps before turning in the assignment, as there were two tables that we did not finish in class. Your completed assignment should have a column chart on one worksheet, a pie chart on another worksheet, and two stacked column charts on two more separate worksheets for a total of four worksheets within the spreadsheet.
If you wish, you may still complete the “PowerPoint Presentations” assignment and turn it in by the end of Workshop 5 for 100 points extra credit (an extra 10% of the final grade). Next week, I’ll have your grades printed off for you so that you can determine whether or not you want to do the extra credit.
If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me.
During my last course, I learned about this web site called SlideShare where you can post PowerPoint presentations that can be embedded in blogs and accessed online without needing to use PowerPoint. If you go to this link, you can see them there. I’ve also updated the postscript posts and embedded the presentations in there.
