Technology Reflections

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