Technology Reflections

I have been using Bloglines to read my blogs, but every now and then I notice weird things with Bloglines. Since I’ve been posting more, I’ve been noticing that my new posts aren’t showing up as quickly as I’d expect in Bloglines. A few months ago I started getting repeat posts in Bloglines, sometimes a few months worth! At that time I set up a Google Reader account, but then Bloglines got better and since I was used to that format I went back to them.

A friend of mine uses Google Reader and he likes it better than Bloglines – he agreed that he likes Google Reader better because that was the one he used first (the same reason I gave for liking Bloglines better). But – I have decided to give Google Reader another shot. Bloglines is still slow in updating and I do still get lots of repeat posts.

I imported my feeds from Bloglines into Google Reader and I have been navigating the new reader and I have decided I like it. There was one thing that I think needs updating (I need to send feedback to Google on this) – since I originally set up the Google Reader last month or so, I had tons of unread posts, but I had actually read them all through Bloglines. In order to mark them all read, I had to click on each feed and then click a Mark All Read link. With over 100 feeds, that was more time consuming than it had to be. It would have been nice to have a global Mark All Read option.

If that’s my only complaint – I think I’m going to be fine with Google Reader…..

I named this blog Technology Reflections because I intended to use it as a place where I could reflect on my use of technology in my Computer and Reading classes. As I was moving posts back over here from wordpress and reorganizing stuff here I began reflecting on the nature of my posts.I do feel that I reflect on my technology use in the classroom, but I’ve also started to blog about technology use in other areas of my life. That’s OK – I can live with that because often the technology that I encounter outside of school impacts the technology that I use in school.

An example of this is something that The Reflective Teacher posted a while back – The Literature Pocketmod. I thought it was really cool and I began thinking of ways to use it in my classroom.

We have state tests coming up and I decided to use it to review the terms the kids would see on the test. Well, being the geek that I am, I decided that I needed to figure out a way to have the kids do this project on the computer. The challenge was to figure out what went on each page before it was folded and cut so that when it was folded and cut everything would be in the right places.

After a few false starts I think I have it figured out. One big obstacle was how to get text upside down. Word does not allow for upside down text – even if you rotate a text box 180 degrees, the text stays right side up! I solved this problem by typing text in Photoshop Elements and inserting it into the word document as an image and then rotating the image.

I’m in the process of finalizing the template and instructions and creating a sample of my own. I have found that the kids will be able to understand complex projects like this better when they can see a finished product. I’ll come back to this post and link the template and instructions when they are finished.

PocketMod Planner

PocketMod Template

PocketMod Sample – this is graphic heavy – be patient with the download

I will use this project for my 8th grade computer class. I think it will be too difficult for my 7th grade Reading classes to do on the computer, but I will still have them complete a handwritten Pocketmod to review those test terms.

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!

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.