After 25 days, over 2400 pictures taken, and countless hours Project X comes to a close.  It was really an awesome project.  I cannot put in words how awed I was by how many people helped spread the word.  It showed me what a small world we really do live on.  We had over 3100 hits to the website, from 6 continents, 43 countries and all 50 United States.  You can see a summary of the hits here - PROJECT X ANALYTICS.  It truly shows the power of social media (Twitter and FB) as well as just regular old email and "word of keyboard." 
I would change some things if we were to do it again.  We needed to be more organized and uniform in our picture taking.  It would have been nice to be about a week ahead of the calendar as well, but as it was we were scrambling the day before and sometimes the day of to get it finished.   However, I liked the Weebly website and would definitely use it again. 

The 8th graders were very diligent in this project.  Yesterday was our first day back at school and as we summed up and discussed the project.  Some of their comments cracked me up - "Are you going to do something like this next year?"  "What could you do to top this?"  "Let's do a Lenten calendar!"  (At this point I said let's move on to Science.)  Their enthusiasm is contagious and appreciated though. 

We received a lot of positive feedback.  Thank you to everyone who took the time to comment on the blog, send an email, or tweet a response.  The 8th graders and I really appreciated it.  (My favorite was when we were told "Mele Kalikimaka" from Hawaii!!)  At the bottomis a Wordle of some of the comments.

God's blessings to all in 2011 - I wonder what Project Y will be this year . . . . . .  Follow along on Twitter at @mra47 and @aslsms

When the 8th graders agreed to do this project with me, I had no idea what we were getting into.  I had some ideas as to how it would go, but I still needed help.  The 8th graders talked through some of the particulars such as how to get the pictures, how to organize them, and how to break up the days among themselves.  The 8th graders were excited from the get go.

Many people have asked how we do it.  It is really quite simple.  We first looked at our registration forms to see which students’ parents had not signed off to have their child’s picture on a website.  Next, I talked with my principal to get her permission for the project, so there is one person who knew what Project X was from the beginning.  The 8th graders then took over and starting taking pictures.  We brought in as many digital cameras as possible and began by just taking students pictures in the direction we need.  After a little while it dawned on us that we should get each child looking North, South, East, West, as well as the in-between positions.  The 8th graders decided that they wanted to be all the days of the week. 

From there we went to work creating the calendar pages.  We used a publisher page with a 7X6 table in it.  Each student was assigned 2 calendar days and 2 devotions to write.  The students then inserted a child’s picture into each box, with the staff members being the actual date.  Some numbers had to be altered, for example we needed Student A holding a 5 instead of a 9.  So we created “number surgery.”  

The website was next. I played around with Weebly.com and decided it would meet our needs.  So each publisher page was created, then saved as a JPEG image and then inserted into the Weebly web page.  That picture is linked to the devotion page.  No magic tricks, nothing fancy or too technical, just a bunch of clicks.

This project has taught me some things.  I have learned that students can take a spark of an idea and turn it into something amazing!  The 8th graders had great ideas for this project.  I planted a seed, they made it grow.  I was shown again that you never know what is going to happen.  The students wanted to track hits to the site, so using Google Analytics we are now tracking it and that led to our goal of reaching all 50 states and 50 countries.  I’ve learned that projects like this never stop growing.  Once people saw the first few days, I was given the idea of the past days link. I’ve also learned that as excited as they were, the8th graders have gotten tired of tweaking the calendar.  They need encouragement too.

 I’ve also RE-learned that teaching is the best job in the world!