Technology Reflections

I have been moving along with using blogs with my 7th graders this past week. I had to stop for a while so that we could finish the novel we were reading. Now that there is only a little more than a week left in the school year, I can concentrate on getting the technology under control so that next year things will go more smoothly.

I think I will revamp the 8th grade computer course for next year so that I can include Blogs, Wikis, podcasts and more. I usually teach the HTML part of that class at the end of the year, but knowing HTML can be so useful in editing blogs. I think I’ll introduce some basic HTML tags at the beginning of the year, and then get more into it later. Other ideas I have is to possibly see about having my students put morning announcements into a podcast and posting it on the school website. I’ll be taking a course about podcasting this summer, so I’m holding off on big podcasting ideas until after I’ve completed that course.

Back to issues I’m currently dealing with. The wiki is giving me pause to think since only one person can be editing it at a time. I was hoping to use it next year for vocabulary (kind of like a wikiictionary) and for collaborative study guides. This is one issue I need to investigate further.

The other issue I’m currently working on is grading. This morning I did an extensive search for blogging rubrics – why reinvent the wheel if someone has already done it? I did find one rubric that I like, though I will have to adapt for my purposes. The other thing to think about is how often is it reasonable to expect students to blog? How many posts? How many comments? What about students who are absent? Can I require them to do the blogging at home? And how do I keep up with it all? I’d love for students to blog at home for required and even additional posts, but even today, not all students have computers at home.

I do feel that I am gaining a handle on all this stuff that’s new to me and how I want to include it in my teaching. Most of my frustrations have come from my students who think that computers are fun and that they can ‘play’ when on them. It’s interesting that my computer students are much more responsible when using the computers than my reading students are. I suppose that’s because I drill the rules into my computer kids, while the reading kids only experience computers with me periodically. I’ll have to work on that next year.

I am really excited to add all this stuff to my repertoire of teaching skills. This has all come to me at just the right time. I was at a point in my teaching that I wanted to go back to school, or do something new. I say that after I fill my brain up with knowledge and I begin to use that knowledge, I have empty spaces to fill. It’s time to fill those spaces.

Today I set up accounts for my 7th grade reading class. I worked out a few of the bugs from the experiences with the 8th graders yesterday, but it still wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked. I need to learn that as long as I learn from mistakes, it’s OK to make mistakes (there’s a great passage from the Phantom Tollbooth that says just that). Anyway – I managed to get all the 7th graders logged on to their accounts and posting today. I had a few false starts when I forgot to add a class as users and they had to repost their comments. Luckily, I had had them copy and past their posts into a word document for safe keeping while I figured this all out.

The 8th grade class went better today, too. Yesterday I had them post reflections on this past school year. Today I had them write a book review like I had the 7th graders doing. The kids were pulling me all sorts of ways during class and I was getting aggravated, but at the end of class as I was summing up the class for them, I realized that every one of them had been actively engaged in their writing and the reason they were all clamoring for my attention at once was because they all wanted me to see what they had written. I have the blog set so that I have to approve of each comment before it is published. I was pulling up finished comments and editing them with each student. It was also showing on the overhead screen. After a few students saw what I was doing, the “Read mine next” appeals started. While it was hectic at the time, I realize now that good learning was going on.

Today’s struggle was getting students set up with their own learnerblogs.org. I followed MHetherington’s advice on setting up blogs, but decided to make some changes. He suggests setting up all the student blogs yourself, but I figured I’d save myself some time and let them set up their own. I told them what to use for a username blog name, but of course, they didn’t all listen and then I realized that they then all knew how to access their own blogs and I have no control over that. I have two more classes that I want to use learnerblogs.org with and I will take the time to create their accounts for them.

Other issues arose when I didn’t realize the time involved in giving each student their password once the blogs were created. I ended up with a lot of downtime for the students which created havoc, which, in turn, stressed me out because I was trying to keep them quiet and give out passwords. I finally solved the issue by having them start writing a response to a prompt on paper which they could them transfer to the blog once they were able to comment. There were still some issues with student not able to log in (solved that by having them close IE, then reopen and go back to the blog and log in).

While I should have anticipated some of the issues that arose today just because I am a veteran teacher, I learned from the experience – no matter how well you think something might work out, it also might not

Hello All!

I am a Middle School Computer and Reading teacher embarking on what I hope to be a year long journey incorporating new technologies – at least for me – into my teaching.

I have begun exploring the uses of Blogs, Podcasts and Wikis in teaching. After attending FETC2006, I began using Gaggle Blogs in my reading classes. The ways that I have used Blogs include responding to readings mostly through the use of a prompt that I posted. I have also had students create study guide questions and then they could comment on each other’s questions with the answers. I have also had students write book reviews and allowed others to view the reviews and leave comments.

My thoughts for future uses include the above and also to add more reflective writings. I would like to hear what my students have to say about their education.

I’m not sure what angle this blog will take – isn’t that the point? but I do hope to look back at the end of next school year to see how far I’ve come in incorporating new technology into my teaching and how it impacts my students’ learning.