Assessment time

It's finals week, with projects and papers due as well. This morning, the computer literacy teaching team is grading the Computer Literacy 2 semester projects. As usual, we've got an interesting variety. One group designed a restaurant using Google SketchUp, another group learned Java programming by recreating the original Frogger game, and we had another photo gallery posted on the commercial photo sharing website, SmugMug. We also had a music composition project, a how-to-play-the-cello instructional DVD, and three publications -- a graphic novel, a fashion magazine, and a photography book highlighting cultural diversity at Uni. As in past years, some groups used various software packages to create game boards based on long-time favorites. This semester we saw Uni Life, Uni Risk, and Uni Clue. Here are two of the possible murder weapons in the Uni-ized game of Clue:



I'm not sure how death-by-protrator works, but I can totally see it with that heavy volume of the Readers' Guide. And, given these two mugs, who would you pick as the likely murder suspect?



Maybe it's time for me to dye my hair blue and get some facial piercings.

Final installment

At least for this year. Alexx and Liz were kind enough to smile for one last earbud buddy picture.



Previous installments can be seen here, here, here, and here.

Though summer is almost upon us, I'm already thinking about next year. I'd really, really like to find a way to use this video about copyright in class. The folks at Disney can't be happy campers about it. Especially not with that Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Summer reading

Our final display for the year is devoted to summer reading. Jenny posted some great annotated book lists on the bulletin board that's out in the hallway. The 2007 Printz Award winners, the 2008 Illinois Abraham Lincoln Award nominees, titles from Publishers Weekly "Hot Books for Summer" list, the 2007 Alex Award winners, and the Ultimate Teen Reading List from teenreads.com. Inside, books are on display and students have been posting their recommendations. One blank yellow page is filled up now, but a whole other one awaits adornment.



Oh, and now I have scouts out spotting earbud buddy photo ops. This picture of Abby and Rohun was taken by Mr. Garvey in the PC lab. Awwwww.

Installment three

Emy and Julia make their selection:



And then get down -



The earbud buddies collection is starting to see some depth -
Installment two
Installment one

Camera happiness

New camera has arrived. Here are some of today's test shots:


Jenny shows GSLIS practicum student Lauren the library ropes.


Gaia fans on the right, sign-making for Improv Club on the left, serious work all down the middle.

One more thing

Lauren came to the rescue on Friday afternoon. Because she had her camera with her, I didn't have to lose out on this particular live action shot:

Possible captions:
Friday before spring break and NO ONE is doing English
Marquis and the girls
The girls and Marquis
The ratio of how many Uni students per puffy library chair equals....
Other ideas?

Caption this photo

To reflect what actually happened, the caption for this photo would read: "Zoe's Cure for the Hiccups."

The cure? Take a big mouthful of water and hang upside down in a library chair. When you sit up, *magic*, your hiccups are gone. (And, you appear to have transformed into an overstuffed chair with poking-out legs and a cute little magazine-cover head...)

Here's an unrelated-but-interesting captioning exercise. This video is called "Introducing the book," but I think it might make better sense to call it "Help Desk." What do you think?