Technology Reflections

My school has some amazing technology.

When I first started working here 8 years ago I thought I was in heaven. Each classroom had 6 computers, my computer lab had 28 student computers and one teacher computer (we have had class size reduction from 28 to 25, but I now have 27 student computers and 2 teacher computers – one at the front of the room to teach from and one on my desk – that is an actually picture of part of my lab), we had school wide email (students even had email the first year) and I had the ability to make a class webpage (I even updated the whole school website at one point). Next year I’m getting a mimio to make my whiteboard interactive!

Today, however, I feel that technology is speeding past me. The computers in my lab are getting old. I’ve lost track of how old they are (I think 4 years) , but in the 8 years the school has been around, I’ve only had one update of new computers. (Well, really my 2 teacher computers are one year younger than the student computers). I wrote yesterday about wanting to use Google Earth and today the IT guys explained to me why it can’t happen; bandwidth, servers and video cards being the most prominent.

My school is actually getting some new computers this year – I think we skipped a year or two of updates in what was supposed to be a rolling update so that each classroom got new computers every 4 years (I think) and I really shouldn’t complain about my 4 year old computers. The computers that are being replaced are original to the school – 8 years! It can take 10 – 15 minutes for people to log onto those computers sometimes. Those original computers aren’t only in some classrooms, but they are in ALL teacher planning rooms. Rumor has it that the brand new computers are going into classrooms and the planning rooms will be getting 4 year old computers from the elementary school (which also got new computers for their classrooms).

OK, back to the point of this post. While my school has more technology than a lot of other schools, we’re not keeping up with the technology. Not that we don’t want to. The biggest obstacle is money.

We sometimes have enough trouble getting teachers to use technology in the classroom. Some are scared of it, some just don’t know how to use it well enough, some are constrained by the need to make sure our students do well on state tests and some just don’t want to be bothered to find new ways to teach, but there are those who would use it if they had equipment capable of handling the newest technology.

It’s that time of year again – State Testing! After the tests are over (2 days this week, 2 days next week) most kids will think that school is over for the year. But we have a little over a quarter of the school year left.

This quarter ends March 15th so there is a little over 2 weeks left. I have been looking for things to do with my 2 Wheel computer classes – Wheel means they change subjects every quarter – and I get a new group of students in every quarter. This year I have really nailed down the curriculum for these classes (6th and 7th graders) except for the last 2 weeks or so. I start out with a Unit on Online Safety, then we do some Word Processing activities (I usually change those each quarter so that I don’t bored) and then we do Spreadsheet activities (these stay the same because I have a good program for teaching spreadsheets). By this time there is about two weeks left in the quarter. I used to teach PowerPoint at this point, but no more! I usually get PhotoStory (which I have decided that I like better than Movie Maker) in during the Online Safety Unit. This quarter’s kids even added narration! I was going to do some Google Earth activities, but GE doesn’t run well on our computers I have asked the IT guys to look into it…so we’ll see….. I think I’ll let the kids make another PhotoStory digital story – maybe I’ll have them make How To videos for the things we learned this quarter…yeah! I like that

That still leaves my 8th grade computer class. I have this class all year….and this year I wish I didn’t. I was spoiled last year with a fantastic 8th grade computer class – probably my best class ever – we had so much fun and learned so much, too! This year’s class is immature and doesn’t care about what I’m teaching them. They only care about impressing their friends and seeing how much they can piss me off Of course not ALL the kids in this class are driving me up a wall. There are some great kids in there to, and if I didn’t have the core group of problem children, they would be a wonderful group to teach. I set up a candy earning behavior system and it works pretty well, but today since they had just done 3 hours of testing where they had to be silent, I tried to give them a break – give them an inch and they took a mile! This class just completed a three step research project; Inspiration Software to plan, then they wrote an essay and ended with a documentary done in PhotoStory. The documentaries were due last Friday and we watched most today. They SO didn’t get it – most of them were childish and silly; narration was not done seriously, music that had nothing to do with the topic, just a song they liked and little to no content. And they had no idea what they had done wrong when I pointed out their shortcomings. A couple were really good though! We have one or two left to view tomorrow. I want to go into Copyright, Effective Searching and Valid Websites next, but every time I try to actually teach, I spend more telling them to be quiet than I do lecturing. OK – I realize I’m being a bit whiney today but sometimes you just get a class that you dread and this is mine…..

Ah well….tomorrow is another day…….

After talking to my IT director, we decided that I should give something he already has in place in a try. It’s the software that he uses to make our school website. It has the ability for teachers to have individual sites that can do just about everything I want. The problem is that every time I have tried to use it I screw it up. I did it again today – I was trying to change its appearance with some of the skins it has and all of a sudden I couldn’t log in any more. Also, every time I made a change, I had to log out and back in to see the changes. I emailed him to say that I couldn’t log in and right now he is recreating my site. I’m waiting to hear back from him and to find out what I did to screw it up! I really want to give this a chance, but it’s a clumsy program – it’s not easy to use and there are many steps to get to what you want.

sigh…………….

I use blogs for my classes. I have a main page and then separate pages for each of my classes. It works well for posting assignments and links to webpages and sometimes documents that my students need to use, but I want something more like an online classroom.

I’ve sent info about Moodle to my IT director to see if that is something we could host, but I’m looking for other ideas. My requirements are (in order of importance):

• Free
• I’d love something just online that doesn’t need to be hosted (in case I hear back from Mr. IT Guy that we can’t host anything)
• Something that would allow lessons to be posted with links to all sorts of things – webpages, documents, even document downloads
• Online quiz capability
• chat room – it would be cool to have a quiet day where the kids would have to contribute to a discussion by typing only
• monitored message board (this might not be a good idea – middle school kids think message boards are for writing silly things )

OK – thats all I can think of right now…feel free to add to your thoughts on what else I should have as well as any suggestions for how to accomplish this without creating my own web pages : )