It’s been an interesting year! I began the year assessing my
students’ technology knowledge and access. And some of the challenges I have
faced are related to the speed of our classroom laptops; I have 10 laptops and
one desktop that students have access to. The more students have worked on the
laptops, the more patient they have become with the varying speeds of them.
Sometimes the laptops worked wonderfully.
I have tried to stay away from the computer labs and mobile laptop carts. The few times I have tried to use them have been frustrating. Most of the computers are not updated with the firewall certificate or the browser is an older version and my students can't open a simple Google docs. For that reason, most of the work that has been done has been using the classroom laptops. The best way to get them all on a computer is using work stations.
Technology Survey
Students accessed the survey via my webpage on the school
site. As a result of the survey, I was able to see that only 43% of my students
used a computer almost daily; only 21% were using the computer to do school
work on a daily basis and 18% on a weekly basis. 60% of my students never or only
once used technology to submit class assignments. These are areas I want to
address throughout the school year.
Comment on the Class Blog
After reading “The Old Man and The Little Grandson” by Leo
Tolstoy, students had to log in to their student e-mails and create a Blogger
profile to answer two questions about the story on the class blog. They were
encouraged to read other classmates’ comments.
Autobiography Narrative
The culminating task for the first unit of the school year
was for students to write an autobiographical narrative. They typed the
assignment on and then submitted the assignment via EnGrade.
Reading Projects
After finishing their independent reading books, students
had to create a PowerPoint Presentation of the novel. Some of the criteria for
the project were: identifying and describing main character, the type of
conflict found in the novel, the theme, the setting.
Some students didn’t do it on the Google docs and so they
had to e-mail it to themselves to complete at home. Others didn’t have Microsoft PowerPoint on
their home computers so they had problems opening it when they e-mailed it. The
students who were most successful completed the assignment using Google docs
and then simply shared the assignment with me.
Station Assignments
On even period days, students complete work in stations. One
of the stations consists of students doing an activity using the classroom
laptops. These activities have consisted of a scavenger hunt of my school
webpage, using the Engrade program to send me a message about grades,
submitting an assignment, and completing online quizzes embedded on the class
blog as review for concepts previously covered. (These quizzes are from EReading Worksheets.)
Website Credibility
Prior to doing research, the class viewed a short Website Credibility YouTube Video.
Students took notes and then had an assignment to explore a few websites to
determine their credibility.
Because some of the district firewalls, some of the classes
were unable to open some of the sites on the assignment page. I had to
constantly change the sites I wanted students to evaluate. However, the
assignment helped students understand not to trust everything posted on a site.
In fact when students began conducting online research for their research
project, I could overhear them asking each other to check the credibility of
the site they were exploring.
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