Sign Language

I am an elementary education major and currently taking sign 1 here at FGCU. I have a great teacher. I am very interested in continuing my sign knowledge after this semester. I have always thought that to myself that I would like to maybe one day be an interpreter. The other day I had experience at work that made my passion to learn sign even greater. I work at target and over the walkies as I was leaving they asked, "does anyone know sign language?" I couldn't believe it, I only know a little bit but I thought that I would give it a try and see if I could help out this customer. I work in the clothing area and the customer needed help in electronics. The guest was full deaf and was having a hard time, you could tell that he was very frustrated. Well this is my first semester of sign language and I was able to help him out. At the beginning of the semester my teacher informed me that after a month or so we should know enough to be able to have a conversation with another deaf person. She was right, she was able to teach my enough signs to were I was able to solve his problems. Also once we were done with his problem, he and I had an approximately 45 minute conversation. I was already late leaving work but I just could tell him I had to go. When a deaf person walks into a store they don't expect to be able to have a conversation with anyone. With me helping him and talking to him I could tell that I made his day. With this experience my passion to learn sign language and help more people in these kind of situations has grown a tremendous amount.

Colin Powell

Friday night March 23rd I helped volunteer at the Colin Powell event. For the event the doors opened up at 4:30 and General Powell started talking at 6 pm. At the beginning I had to stand at the doors and help the ticket takers out. If anyone was to come in with a handicap ticket I was to show them where their seats were located. There were about 100 volunteers and everyone was in charge of a section of the stadium or something else. I was in charge of section VV, which was the handicap section located on the second floor. This was a very interesting speech. I wasn't able to catch all of the speech because I was helping out here and there but from what I heard it was amazing. Gen. Powell is very funny, the one thing that he mentioned that he misses from being secretary of state is his private jet. He enjoyed walking out of the airport and having red carpet and security protect him from all the people around. When he would be walking to his jet the pilot would start the opposite side engine, and then once he would get to the stairs the other engine would turn on. The pilot and Gen. Powell were in sync with the starting. Once he would get into the plane the pilot wouldn't take off until he had a diet coke in his had. Also while he was speaking there was a small caption on the screen with a sign language interpreter. It was a very good event and I am happy that I was able to attend it.

eBook in Powerpoint

Over spring break we were assigned to complete a PowerPoint where once it was played it would be like a book. There had to be at least 14 slides in the PowerPoint. The story that was developed for this assignment was one that was taken from our previous assignment A1. For the pictures in the slides we were aloud to scan pictures or draw and scan pictures. We were not aloud to take them from a book or the Internet, they had to be original. After we figured out how our story was going to go we had to put them in order and then put in our voice narration. We had to use audacity again and record ourselves telling the story. It was a fun and interesting project. There were also little things that were required like the font had to be at least 24 there couldn't be less than 6 lines on page and so on. What I learned from this project is that I DEFINITELY do not know how to draw. Instead of trying to find pictures I decided to go ahead and make it interesting and draw everything. The biggest challenge for me is to get the narration to play without having to click on the slide after the timings are set up. I tried and I tried for such a long time and I still just cant get it. I e-mailed Dr. Baylen and he tried to help me but for some reason I just could not figure it out. It is pretty sad because I took 4 years of computer classes in high school. What I learned about myself as a learner is that I need to take another refresher computer course because I feel like I am forgetting to do everything. Overall this was a fairly simple project (if you understood what you were doing). I enjoyed making a little book and I hope when we fix up our books in a couple of weeks, it will be easier to understand how to do things.

Completing eBook assignment

Completing the eBook experience with my 5 year old cousin was fun. She had never heard of eBooks before so she was interested in what it is. Lillian loves to read any time. Whenever I go to her house she always asks if she can read me a book. That is one of the reasons that I chose her to do this with. Also I chose her because she is the age of the children that I hope to work with one day in the classrooms. She was very interested in the books that I chose to read with her. She was laughing, smiling and wanting to read more once we were all done. Once we were all done and I had to ask her the questions, it was kind of difficult. They were too complex to ask a 5 year old. On a couple of them I would get like one word from her and then she would start to talk about something else. With the questions like how should this be used in the classroom she was able to answer right away and say yes during reading and free time, but with the questions about how can the teacher or parent can implement this in the classroom. She did not know how to answer that, she just did what a typical five year old would do and changed the subject. Over all though this was a fun project and my cousin really enjoyed the eBooks. She wants to come over and read them all the time now.