The optimal word here is slowly. Through the first grading period, we upped our enrollment from six students to 20; added 8 new computers; installed updated operating systems across the entire lab of 20 computers; received a site license for Adobe Design Premium CS4 (then downgraded that to CS3 to match Globaloria's specifications and endured literally weeks of chasing Adobe tech support from Charleston, to Texas, to India, and finally to the Philippines, back to Charleston, then California in order to get the right software to download). And then, a fire in our internet routing system knocked us off the internet for a week. All of that was just to get ready to begin teaching.
All twenty students are now up and running, and they are getting decently proficient on the Mac System, (only two students had Mac experience at the beginning of the class) so, OS X had to be taught before we could teach the software. Our wiki is up, student G-mail accounts are up and running, their wikis and blogs are started, and linked to the user wiki and students are working on game play as well as time based flash animation. Students have been assigned to update their blogs twice a week, each Monday and Friday and for homework we are working on basic drawing skills.
Approaching this from a graphic arts background, I am intent on making progress in their basic drawing skills. Less than 25 percent feel they have artistic skills—we'll soon see about that. The subject of "artistic ability" is one I really feel strongly about, and a subject I feel is related directly to "music ability". This is an issue will be the subject of a post here in the very near future.
But, for now, progress has come, and though slowly, it has arrived and I am excited, and at last, beginning to enjoy this new subject and new way of teaching.
