Technology Reflections

This time it’s two weeks with students. So far, so good! Most of my students and classes are really good. A few random kids who still do not understand that it’s rude to talk when someone else is talking, a few who will take negative attention over no attention and I always forget how young and needy the 6th graders are at the beginning of the year.

In Reading class we are reading Tangerine by Edward Bloor. This is probably the 4th year that I’ve taught this book and every year I learn more about it and like it even more! It’s always a slow start, but we’re getting through it. I’m supposed to do a book in about 4 weeks and then the LA teachers do a book in their class for the second half of the quarter. Luckily I only have one LA teacher to coordinate with and we are really flexible with each other. Also, she tends to read the book more in class and I tend to have the kids read more at home so that we can discuss in class. The idea is to not have the kids have to read too many books for homework. In addition to the books we read in class, they all have to be reading an independent book for our Reading Counts program.

The computer classes are going well. We’ve finished the Online Safety unit in all computer classes. 6th graders are making Wanted Posters for the WizzyWigs, characters from the Netsmartz curriculum that I use. I’ve moved onto teaching the 7th graders how to use Word more effectively and 8th graders are about to begin a Unit on Digital Photography.

I have decided NOT to use blogs in my classes this year. One overriding reason is the time and effort it takes me to set up all the accounts. In order to ensure safety, I created gmail emails for each of my students in 8th grade computers and reading classes – thats about 100 kids. Then I had to go create each of the blog accounts for them, because I had to keep the gmail email passwords private (I did the gmail+name trick so that all passwords and emails came to one gmail account that I had control over). This week I found a new tool that I am going to use – www.myhaikuclass.com While it does not have blog features, it does have a discussion area where the kids and I can have message board type discussions. It also allows students to upload assignments to me, which I think is cool! There is an email feature, but the teacher has to ENABLE the feature for students to email each other – I won’t be doing that for liability reasons, but I will be able to email the kids and they can respond to me. One other great feature is that the kids do not need to have an email address to sign up and I can have each kid sign up on their own through a special link. That will save me hours of time. I plan to use this program with 8th Grade Computers and Reading classes.

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.

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 : )