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...