So, week two of the school year is under my belt and I must say it has been a great start. I've enjoyed getting to know my students and beginning our journey to become literary and written scholars. This school year I've set several goals for myself and my classroom:
1. Go paperless (as much as possible)
2. Accelerate student achievement (borrowed from district goals)
3. Provide opportunities and encourage my students to become published writers
In my next three posts, I will be discussing how each of these goals is going so far. Goal #1 is to go paperless in my classroom. So far, this is not going as smoothly as I had hoped. My plan for the first few days of school was to set-up all of the accounts for the online resources we would be using. In order to do that my students needed an email address. I had this great idea to have students set-up a professional (or student) email account through Gmail to help with this. Not only would this allow us to create the rest of our accounts, but it would also open the door to begin discussing digital responsibility and citizenship. This discussion began with choosing appropriate user names for accounts that are tied to our places of work (in the case of my students - school). However, for a couple of days Gmail didn't cooperate with us, and only one class was able to successfully create their email accounts. Another day our network was down which caused me to have to resort to "Plan B". I assigned the students homework to create the account at home and I am happy to report that many did that and were successful. I think come Tuesday, we will be ready to go with the other resources.
Unfortunately, these technology issues caused me to have to make paper copies, which I am totally trying to avoid. However, I am confident that once these accounts are set-up we will be able to move on to a "green" classroom, which excites all of us.
Technology is a wonderful thing, but it is also your worst enemy when it doesn't cooperate. However, part of being a teacher is maintaining that sense of flexibility when things do not go as planned.
That's great. Did you get any comments from parents. Last year, a few families said that they do not allow their child to use the computer. Email and social networking was out of the question. I'm glad to hear that creating email accounts worked for you.
ReplyDeleteDo you have the netbooks in your classroom, this year? If so, I think that I will ask Jamie to set up accounts for 6A students, too.
Hello,
ReplyDeleteI did not get any comments from parents. I made it clear that the email would be used for "professional" purposes and that I would also be teaching some digital citizenship and responsibility. So far the response has been positive, from both students and families.
I do have netbooks in my classroom. It's been a rough road, so far, but we are plugging along trying to get everything up and running. We should be done with our online accounts and procedural things tomorrow.