Technology Reflections

Sometimes technology just seems to get the better of me. The way my day started out I should have stayed in bed….and it didn’t get much better as the day went on.

First, it was taking 10 mins for the kids to log onto the computers this morning. I get in touch with the IT guys and by 2nd period that was fixed, but 1st period didn’t get to blog today.

My 4th period class is using Writely.com so that they can share documents with me for grading and checking for plagiarism (I’m using a little program called EVE2 for that). I had to have the kids set up their own using accounts using their own email addresses because I couldn’t have it all on my email for sharing purposes. They needed to get a confirmation code from their own email to use the program, but a bunch of them said they never got the code. We can’t check email from school, but I had them do the ’send me the code again’ option anyway. I told them to check their spam folders and hopefully they will be able to access it this weekend. In the meantime, I had them type their essays in word and they either saved it to a flash drive or I emailed it home to their personal emails.

I did have four essays that were completed and shared with me, so I checked them for plagiarism. One had 5%, but that was mostly the questions that I had ’selectively appropriated’ from a website on the same topic as the test – History of Computers. The other one, however had 55% plagiarism. The program is very cool; it highlights the plagiarized parts and saves it as a new document. It also lists the websites that have similar phrasing so that you can go look and check it. The other two that I have had no plagiarism! Now I need to get the remaining 18 and read and grade them all! Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend