Technology Reflections

Still thinking about my last post…..I still really like Zoho, but I’m beginning to think that the learning curve for the kids may be too great, at least for the reading kids, since I have so much content that I need to cover. I still want the kids to do collaborative notes, but I think I will use a wiki for that – wikispaces or pbwiki. I have used both and I like both.

Google would be another good alternative – Google Docs and Spreadsheets are great, and they can be shared and collaboratively edited. After reading Clarence Fisher’s post today, I started thinking about teaching RSS to the 8th graders next year. Since I use Google Reader, it would be easy for me to teach the kids how to use it. Keeping everything in Google makes sense.

For the past two years I’ve used blogs with the kids as a means for them to respond to writing prompts. I want more of a true blog next year, with student reflections. I’m thinking about having the kids write something reflective twice a week. Their reflections could be about anything school related; a book they are reading, how hard the science test was, how much they hate math , etc. Just to get the kids writing. I will grade it only on completion, I will not judge their writing or their spelling or their grammar. I will comment when I can and I will encourage them to read their classmate’s blog and make appropriate comments. I think this will help their writing overall. For blogs I use wordpress.

I’ve also been thinking about the email accounts that I mentioned in my previous post. The kids need email accounts to register for all the wonderful online stuff. Pros: I have control of each and every email account, I have the passwords if someone should forget theirs (I don’t let the kids change their password from the default one) Cons: It takes a long time to set up each account, I will have to monitor all the mail when they start sharing documents Alternatives: Have each student set up their own gmail account. They would have to give me their password so that I can monitor them (but in reality, I probably wouldn’t log onto what could be 100 accounts to monitor them). Am I being too over protective? – these are for 7th and 8th graders. I would love to hear thoughts on this – help me decide how to handle the email issue.