Technology Reflections

Today in my Reading Classes (1st, 3rd and 5th periods) I planned to have the kids finally post their News Stories to their blogs and then answer some questions about the reading they did over the weekend.

During first period the blogs were not working well. Again, some kids could post and others couldn’t. I noticed a lot of extra HTML stuff when they copied and pasted from Word, so I was having the kids remove the tags. That took forever and most of them did not manage to get a lot done. Towards the end of that class I remembered a site that Stumble took em too recently – writetomyblog.com. I had the kids check to see if they could access it since we have just about everything blocked, and it was blocked. Even though we start out with just about everything blocked, we can ask for sites to be unblocked and 99% of the time they are unblocked for us. I emailed the IT guy and by third period he had unblocked the site for me

During third period though, we kept getting errors and I never figured out what the problem was during that period. I kept thinking about it, though and I realized that I was able to publish from writetomyblog when I typed straight into the blog, and the errors were happening when we copied and pasted from Word. 

At the start of fifth period I tested my theory about the copying and pasting and I was right. We can copy and paste from other web pages, though – the kids could copy and paste the questions that needed to be answered from my blog to writetomyblog.

What I like about writemyblog is that there is NO registration needed! You jsut go to the site, type what you want and publish it to your blog. The best features are that you can spell check your post and add tables. It also has the capabilities to change fonts and sizes and colors, but not all blogs support that.  There are many other things that writetomyblog can do, but I love the basic things the best. As a matter of fact – this post was published from there!

I had one of those weeks this past week, where I felt that I was not doing a good job of teaching my students. Actually, it had been building for a while and made a turnaround this past week.

In my Reading classes we are in the middle of a novel, Tangerine by Edward Bloor. Great book! This is the third or fourth year that I have taught it and I actually think that I’m doing the best job of it this year. I am finally to the point where I don’t feel like I need to feed every nuance of the book to the kids and it’s OK if we skip discussions on certain parts. Some of the less important parts I am just summarizing for the kids and that allows us time to discuss the more important parts in more detail. I think that because we are in the middle of the book, things were slowing down and I was feeling like we were in a rut. At my school, the Language Arts and Reading Departments switch off reading novels – each reading a novel for half a quarter. That gives each department about 4½ weeks to read a novel. That should be enough time, but with interrupted classes and the varying lengths of books, it just doesn’t always work out perfectly. Tangerine is a lengthy book (about 250 pages) and it has a lot of things going on in it so it typically takes me longer than my allotted 4½ weeks. It’s OK though – I coordinate it with my corresponding LA teacher (luckily there is only one 7th grade LA teacher and I’m the only 7th grade Reading teacher). Last year it took me close to 8 weeks to get through the book. This year I think I’ve got it down to 6 We have a long weekend for kids next weekend (we have an early release day and a teacher work day back to back at the end of each quarter in our district) so I am assigning a bunch of reading for them to do over those days. Then I think I can finish up the book in the next week and a half.

Back to why I feel that my Reading classes are coming out of a rut. I felt as though the kids were not paying attention during class discussions and that it was always the same kids who were responding to the questions. Last year I was trained in Socratic Seminars. This is a great way to discuss any topic – the students really have to think about what they are saying, they have to support their comments with details from the text and – the best part, IMO – they are challenged by their peers. I did them mostly with my 8th grade class last year, but I wanted to have my 7th graders participate this year. I gave them a very short introduction and then let them discuss a question I posed. Of my three reading classes my 1st period class did the best – they were awesome! 3rd period was pretty good and 5th needs some help – they were too giggly to get a good discussion going. Of course it was the first time and I gave them a very short introduction. I will teach it to them again and they will do better. Overall, though – it went very well.

In addition to my 7th Grade Reading classes, I also teach Computer Skills to 6th, 7th and 8th graders. The 6th and 7th grade classes are wheel classes; they change every 9 weeks. The 8th grade class is all year.

In the 6th and 7th grade classes I teach them to use Office Products more effectively (they think they know how to use them already – I show them lots of things they never knew – hehe) Usually in those classes I end up with about the last 2 weeks to do something different. I used to teach PowerPoint during the last two weeks, but there are so many other other products out there that are better in many ways.

This quarter I decided to have the 6th and 7th graders do digital stories using Windows Movie Maker. I decided that since we had less then 2 weeks from start to finish, that I was not going to scan any pictures for the kids – they had to bring in pictures already in digital form. Well – wow! I can’t believe the issues that is creating.

At the beginning of the quarter I strongly suggested that each student get a flash drive – not all did so they have no way to transport the pictures to school. I suggested a CDR, but not everyone has a CD burner at home. Some kids tried to save to floppy disks not knowing the disk was too small to hold many pictures. And it’s not just the kids – their parents don’t know how to use the technology either. It’s just so frustrating when I try to do what I think will be a quick, fun project and it turns into a nightmare.

Reading the Thinking Stick 1 year anniversary post made me think about something that happened last week.

Instead of a chapter test, I had my 7th grade reading classes write a news story about an incident that happened in the novel we’re reading. One student was taking longer than usual. This student is constantly in motion and often needs reminders to pay attention. During this assignment he kept looking on the computer of the student next to him to see what she was writing and he just didn’t seem to be putting much effort into doing his own work. I’ve been a Special Education teacher for about 20 years and I have found that if I push some kids, they actually do the work and then they feel great about themselves. This student is usually one of those who thinks he needs help, but can actually do the work if he takes the time to focus on the work rather than complaining about it : ) (Note: The students in this class are not special ed [well some have IEPs] – it is a reading class for students who earned an average score on the state tests)

Well, Friday I was reminded that things aren’t always what they seem. This student was far behind the rest of the class. He had one paragraph written and seemed to be dawdling on writing any more…..until I took a closer look. I realized that he WAS trying to work, but his typing skills are so bad that he couldn’t do the work. He was actually in tears before I noticed and I felt horrible! He wanted to do the work so badly (he was afraid he’d get an F if he didn’t finish that day) that he wouldn’t even go to the restroom to wash his face and get a drink of water, even when I told him to go.

I finally asked him if he’d rather finish the assignment on paper and he said yes and look so relieved! I also asked him if he wanted me to email his mother and tell her that he needed a typing program at home, and he said yes. He will not get to take my computer class this year because he is in another all-year elective, so he won’t even get basic computer skills at school. I did email the mother and she responded quickly agreeing to get the typing program. I also asked the student if he wanted to take a break from the assignment or if he wanted to work on it over the weekend and he said he wanted to do it over the weekend. I told him he did not have to hand it in typed unless he chose to.

Here I was thinking that I was doing something fun for the kids by having them type a writing assignment – and post it on their blog – but for this child it was torture!

(Note: there are no links in this post because I get errors when I try to post with links – I will add links as soon as I can)