Technology Reflections

Yikes! I just looked at the school calendar and realized that Interims for 2nd quarter go home a week from tomorrow. That means that I will have to have the grades entered into the computer program by Thursday afternoon. I am so far behind on grading (my biggest weakness as a teacher). I have brought a bag of work home each weekend for at least the last three weekends and not touched it! I do get some grading done at school; sometimes during class while the kids are working independently (computer classes mostly) and I will stay after school to get stuff done. I do tend to work better under pressure, so this week will be a pressure-filled rush to get everything graded

Yup – I got an ipod Touch today! it’s soooo freakin cool! I still have my video ipod and I’m going to keep that for a while since it’s 30GB and the touch is only 16. I have a ton of audiobooks, so I kept those in the video ipod (along with everything else) and put music and videos on the touch. The coolest thing about the touch is the wi-fi access! I have a wireless network in my house, so I’ve been playing with that. It’s going to be really cool to not have to pull out the laptop, or lug it around in places with free wi-fi. I’m especially looking forward to using it at FETC in January. Maybe I’ll even do some live blogging. The keyboard is a bit sensitive, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

To keep this post somewhat education oriented, I’ll talk about another new toy I’ve been using – Classblogmeister . It’s a great tool to keep kids safe online while allowing them to blog. I used Learnerblogs for the past few years, but all of a sudden last year I couldn’t access them at school. They weren’t being blocked, but the IT guys could not figure out why the pages wouldn’t load. Learnerblogs was cool because of all the different templates, but in order to have security for the kids I had to set up individual accounts for each student using the gmail+name system. That was time consuming. With Classblogmeister I copy and pasted names from my class roster into their system and had classes set up quickly. Classblogmiester doesn’t have many templates to choose from, but my students will live I have been having some issues with Classblogmeister, but I’m forging ahead with it and I’m going to introduce it to my students tomorrow. I just hope that I can actually access it at school……..