Office 2010 Exams

Last January and these last two weeks I participated in a workshop to develop the Objective Definitions of the new Office 2010 exams with Certiport. All together I have spent ten days with great people hashing over what topics should be tested for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. I had a great time and learned quite a bit about each of the programs. I am totally excited to use Office 2010 and look forward to using it with my students as well. However, I probably won't be using it with my students until the 2011-12 school year. My district mostly doesn't like to implement zero software. That means any new software that doesn't have any updates. For instance, they don't like to have 1.0 or 2.0 or 10.0 software. They prefer to have 1.3 or 2.9 or 10.4 versions. Plus, since I prepare my students to take the IC³ exams, I don't want to use Office 2010 until Certiport updates these exams to use Windows 7 and Office 2010. I'm guessing this will probably happen in 2011 sometime.

However, I know that this next year I will need start preparing my practice exams and trainings for Windows 7 and Office 2010 so that I will be prepared to teach them when they come out. Of course I have to finish the Vista and Office 2007 version of my trainings before this next year. This should keep me busy for awhile.

Thoughts of the Last Year

So, it obviously has been quite some time since I have written on my blog here. School has ended and now I am "relaxing" duirng my summer vacation. A few updates:

• All but one of my students from last semester (13 out of the 14) pass all three of the IC3 exams (that's roughly 93%)
• I actually have about 25 students registered for my 9th-grade class each semester next year. Hopefully I will be able to increase that as the years go on.

I had a great time this last year with my students learning these essential skills they need for the 21st century. I would say the greates thing that happened this last year was being able to purchase the unlimited IC3 exams for a year. It totally changed the way that I taught. I went from trying to teach abstractly to teaching more concretely. Now, I'm sure a LOT of people out there would say that this is backwards, but it really helped out. By the end of the first quarter of the second semsester most of my students were IC3 certifed. I then could move on to more abstract teaching. Students were learning more about how computer worked and were working on projects in PowerPoint. It was very successful and there was a lot of learning going on both by my students and myself.

All in all, it was a great year. I'm looking forward to this next year and can't wait to have even more students become IC3 certified.