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.