Week 3

The transition towards a paperless classroom is less difficult that I originally thought.The students are very used to the pen and paper and are struggling with google docs at the moment. Once they submit more work digitally, I am sure they will buy in.

In my last post, I mentioned that sometimes technology poses problems in class that I don't encounter when planning. Setting up all of my students on gmail was a good example of this problem, though 3 weeks later, 95% of students are on gmail. Yeah!! Along with gmail of course we have calendar, and docs that I want to utilize. A few growing pains there too but easily fixed.

Today however, we started with blogger. Blogger is tightly connected to google. If when setting up a gmail account you don't need a verification code, good for gmail, not so good for blogger. Should be a seamless transition to blogger right, WRONG!! Spent almost an entire period getting 13 students set up with a blog spot. Most needed verification codes and most students didn't have a cell phone on them. What to do, what to do, ah ha, find another student roaming the school (probably texting in the halls). That was the easiest part of the period. I borrowed a student from another class whom I am familiar with in terms of their habitual cell phone use. As we were walking back to my classroom, I commented on how this was an ironic situation, I have taken the student cell phone a couple of times during class this year and now I was needing help. Anyways, one person in the class went without getting signed on to blogger, but all the students did. Google sends a verification code to a cell phone as a text. The cell phone number can't be used more than 6 times. Without enough cell phones, we can't verify accounts. I even phoned husband at home to check the cell for a code, wouldn't you know it, I had too many verifications attached to my number. Ahhh!! Hopefully tomorrows class will go a bit smoother.

Until next time...

Week 1-survived without casualty

I made it, thank goodness. The first three days of classes are over and I survived along with the students. It is always a mish mash of activity in the first couple of days. I want wiki's set up, gmail accounts opened and remembering your password is also important. A new experience for me this year was the number of students attending that were not on my list.In one class I had 4 new students. That makes me a little frantic but we managed. The biggest concern was that they didn't have passwords to get on to the network. But we muddled through that hurdle as well.

I geeked a lot this summer and hopefully all that time will pay off this school year. I plan to bring my classes into the 21st century with 21st century learning tools. Web 2.0 is my focus for my computer classes.But along with the use of technology also comes pitfalls that you don't see coming when planning quietly on the laptop with a yummy cup of coffee at your side. For instance, I had a cool lesson planned, we watched a tech video and the students were to note down 20 terms from the video about technology. Then they were to put them in a Wordle and post it on their wiki. Worked for me on my teacher computer, should be no problem right? Wrong! The flash player hasn't been updated. All they could see was a blank screen, it would have been ok had the html code showed up, but of course that didn't work either. Think, think, think. I had them choose a wordle from the gallery about tech and post that.Not what I had hoped but worked. I also let them post their favorite video on their wiki's as well, they really enjoyed that exercise.

In another class, I had them set up gmail accounts, the set up site was down. Ahhhhh. Could have been that we had too many people trying at once, but I have done it in the past. Solution, I asked them to set them up at home over the weekend and we moved on to photoshop.

Live and learn I guess. I have a lot of boys this year compared to girls. I will have to make some changes to lessons that account for this dynamic. Girls are content to sit and listen and then work, boys in general are less likely to do that. We will have to do a lot more hands on work to keep them engaged.

Goal #5 adjust lessons to engage the accommodate a more rambunctious class.

Until next time...

...and the clock keeps ticking

I have put in a lot of work this summer researching different web tools that I could use in class this year. I've narrowed it down and have vowed to become a master with a small number of tools rather than over extend myself by using too many. I mentioned the 30 goals challenge in an earlier post. I have set 3 of the 30 with no hope in sight of completing them in one month, a school years seems a little more realistic.

I have been in school a couple of times and have things set in stone for the first 3 days of class. I have been having difficulty deciding what order I am going to teach my units. Digital citizenship and managing a digital footprint is important, but we need to look at google docs which leads into blogger to display some of the student ideas about this topic. I like the creative nature of prezi, glogster or slideshare. Should I start with that first. There are so many things I want to do and will do, but deciding on an order that makes the most sense is difficult. Goal #4 Present topics in order that makes most sense, flow seamlessly if possible.