Technology Reflections

As a response to my Writely issues, The Reflective Teacher has suggested Writeboard. I did actually look at Writeboard when I was searching for something to use and I chose Writely because the interface looks more like a traditional Word Processor and there are fun options for fonts – something to hold the students’ interest

Students were supposed to go home this weekend and send me their Writely documents – an essay test we did in class – but I have only received one so far. IF they come in tomorrow and still report problems accessing Writely, then maybe I’ll try Writeboard. With Writeboard they can create their own accounts, but all use my email to sign up.

**there are no links in this post because everytime I linked something and tried to save the post, I got a blank screen. Maybe that is the same glitch that didn’t allow comming yesterday

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

I’ve been so bad about keeping up this blog. My intentions were to write about the day to day school stuff and then be able to look back and see how I evolved in my technology use. Right now I’m finding it hard enough to keep up with my day to day tasks of teaching 6 classes (4 preps!). Though I can’t complain – I love the classes I teach and I love the variety in my day. My day goes like this: 7th Grade Reading, 7th grade Computers, 7th Grade Reading, 8th Grade Computers, 7th Grade Reading, 6th Grade Computers.

In addtiion to teaching, I follow 57 blogs! I didnt realize how many until I mentioned Bloglines to my 8th grade computer class and I pointed out how many feeds I have.But if I didn’t read those feeds everyday, Iwould never have found a fabulous lesson plan to teach writing or the follow up plan. I did both of these plans with my 6th and 7th grade computer classes (I changed the pictures from the first PowerPoint). Both of those classes just happened to be starting projects that involved writing about pictures. Both classes loved the lessons – I think the use of the funny, engaging pictures really helped to keep their attention. The 6th graders, especially, appreciated the second lesson which broke the concept down more. I think The Reflective Teacher is an amazing teacher and I wish I could lure him (her?) to come teach at my school. In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep reading my blogs…..

I just checked my school email and there were two emails that the class wiki had been updated – kids were working on it from home!!! It wasn’t assigned – they didn’t have to, but they did!

Wahoo!