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...