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 just checked my school email and there were two emails that the class wiki had been updated – kids were working on it from home!!! It wasn’t assigned – they didn’t have to, but they did!

Wahoo!

Yesterday I introduced my 8th graders to the wiki and explained the assignment. They are to research and post on their assigned History of Computers topic, then they will get to look at what everyone else posted and add to and/or correct information.

I took a look just now at what some of them posted and used the comments feature to leave them feedback. Most of the feedback at the moment was to check their spelling and grammar and to make that their information related to the History of Computers.

Also, since the wiki is accessible from anywhere, I told two students who are suspended on Tuesday that their make-up work is to work on their topic at home

Yesterday I was stuck at home thanks to Ernesto – the Hurricane that wasn’t. He was a Tropical Storm, but in reality we’ve had stronger regular old summer storms recently. I took advantage of the day off to get my school technology in order – as I wrote about in previous posts.

To follow up on those posts I decided to use PBwiki for the classwiki. I have decided that I will give the students the password and set up strict guidelines for what they can and cannot edit. I don’t want to pay the premium price for advanced tools until I see how well it works for me and my classes. As with anything new, actual use will let me know what adjustments I need to make.