Teacher: James Farnsley
Campus: Sanger High School
Subject: Web Mastering

I had the privilege to observe my high school’s web mastering class throughout the second semester of the school year. Per request of my principal I observed our web mastering class since this would be the class that I would be teaching next year. Throughout the second semester the students were working on a class project of creating our school’s web page. The teacher let them choose areas of interest (athletics, academics, clubs, faculty, prom and graduation, etc.) that they would like to work on and provided them with deadlines throughout the semester. I really liked the fact that the students had individual deadlines, but at the same time they were working on a big class project! The students were not only required to create the pages, they were also required to provide written documentation for every step that they did. This was to provide the future web class with step by step instructions on how to update the site. I really liked that part of the assignment because it made the students really think out their plans on paper and I am sure that it will greatly help me next year since I am the one taking it over!

The way that this particular teacher set up his class assignments was interesting to me as well. Basically he teaches this class as a “projects” class. Some consist of individual projects while some are group projects. I really feel that this reflects today’s working world. Not all of us will be our own boss one day and these students need experience in working on individual projects as well as working toward a whole project. Whatever the student becomes, they will have to learn to communicate, create and recreate, modify and adapt to people and certain situations. I think that this class is a great example of that.

I am so fortunate to have gotten a chance to observe this class before I take it over next year. This allows me to be a little more prepared for next year. I only wish that I would have gotten to do some observing during the first semester so I could have seen how he approached the coding part of the class.

Teacher: Patricia Taylor
Campus: Sanger High School
Subject: Digital Graphics and Animation

I observed my schools Digital Graphics and Animation class. I observed this class periodically throughout the year as well but not as much as I did the web mastering class. I mainly observed this teacher’s class procedures and structure. I wanted to see how she went about teaching the TA subject and if it was easy for the students to grasp. This teacher has basically been my mentor this past year. She has taken a lot of classes in Digital Graphics and has helped me when I was first learning Adobe Photoshop. Now with all of my knowledge that I have learned through TATC, I help her out with assignments and trouble shooting.

On this particular day the students were learning about flash movies and masking text. The teacher started off talking about the important terminology and then showed a demo that she had created. She then provided them with step by step instructions and had them create the demo on their own computers. The students then had to create the same thing but do it using shapes or pictures instead of text.

I think that this lesson in particular could definitely be used in the real world. This masking process was the same type of thing used on the Dallas Morning News commercials, where the people were made out of newspaper print. Some of the students started trying this immediately! One was pretty successful at it, with just a quick sketch.

By observing this class and lesson, I could really see the diversity in the learners. I think that a lot of the students were far more advanced than what the lesson was intended for. This reminded me that when I start teaching any of the TA subjects that I want to be sure that I have lessons for all levels of learners so that I can provide them with hands-on tasks that are appropriate to the level.