Classes are driving me crazy!

Just submitted my paper on an interview.  I was only able to fill two pages with the information given for the assignment. Did anyone else have the same problem?  I am struggling with time management between the amount of work in this class and my other class.  Both classes have the same amount of credits but this class has a lot more work to it. I plan on writing the paper for the final in this class and hope to get a lot done over this long weekend.  

Social networking

Since there is no discussion this week, so I don't forget I am going to post my discussion here so I have a place to refer to.  In my experience with students these are the social skills and competencies I have seen.  First looking back at another part of the article strikes a chord with me.  Families who have access to books, attend concerts, have discussions at dinner, and go to museums develop skills that help kids with school.  Computer use in the one also increase the skills students will have.  Ethics are not inherent the need to be taught be a mentor and via media instruction.  Play, I keep thinking back to Oregon Trail,(previous post) and how we could solve problems while traveling the trail, if we didn't die before the game ended.  Today some of our students play Sumdog which allows them to use math at their level to compete against other students and gain things for their avatars.  Some classes have done the stock market game to understand economics.  I like that the addressed the difference between off task and multitask. Our school is beginning to use google communities to share knowledge.  Students will be using schoology for their communications.  I give the students lessons each year on selecting good sources for research. Our fourth graders use ven diagrams to compare different versions of fairy tales including video versions.  Last year our sixth graders made their own versions of give a mouse a cookie on educreations.  Our fifth graders are giving news reports using a green screen. Rather than creating links on my web page I just maintain bookmarks on a delicious page for students to access.  Reading about the social networking makes me reiterate my wish for facebook and my space.  Since kids are creating profiles anyway and lying about their age to do so I with they would just allow kids to be honest about their age but automatically enable safety measures when someone under a certain age creates a profile.  Our school has a Facebook page for the community to check into.  Media literacy needs to be worked on more in our school, where do we find the time for everything.

       Second questions we had student save their items to a server with a teacher facilitating sharing until we started with google docs a couple of years ago, however due to inappropriate use of email by students teachers still need to facilitate the sharing.  Fourth grade also uses kid blog which also requires teachers to preview comments before posting.

   Third question I would probably use google since that is what many schools are moving to due to cost reasons.

Technology, technology.

A friend of mine put this on her Facebook page and asked for comments.  I used one of the from 7th grade and even into college for projects with a dot matrix printer.

What do you think?

Aargh!,,,,

National pirate day today words express how I am feeling about technology this week. Nwea books a ton of customers and doesn't have the capability to keep up with the volume, then ios7 comes out today and ties up all the bandwidth. It's ridiculous when it takes almost an hour to get 25 out of 60 computers to accept a student to take a test. How can we validate a test when kids are stressed, the teacher is stressed, and others are stressed over just logging in to the system. (Students are also talking because the are impatient.) They told us today we could postpone but how does that affect results when some of the kids had crappy testing conditions and a few others would have better conditions. I hope they get it fixed for spring.

Technology is not always what it is cracked up to be!

After fighting computers with MAP testing all day today and knowing I have eight more days of this if I have any hair left at the end of the week I will be surprised. Fortunately my gophers won this week. Thinking on how I want to approach my mid quarter project. Would like to get a good start before my photography class starts next week. Spent the afternoon helping our kindergarten team get their web pages done. Two are retiring this year so kudos to them for learning some new technology their final year. Talked to one of the teachers I want to interview for my project and she is happy to help. More info about our school we are one to one for grades 6-9 with ipads, we have chrome books and ipads for checkout in both buildings, and three labs in each building. Our older students can Boyd. All our staff are creating web pages with weebly and we are a google school with all forth grade up having their own accounts.

Learning

This summer has been my inaugural trip into online learning. I feel I am pretty good with technology but this has been scary and frustrating at times. Presenting has given classmates issues, thankfully not me. I was so scared I would have tech issues with my final presentation that since half of the students were live in the class I decided to join them that day. I miss not knowing what my classmates look like and the face to face interaction. I think when Mert had three students show up live the last day it was nice he turned the camera on them so we could see that they looked like. Unfortunately they couldn't share their snacks with those of us at home. Classes this way do save me from having to drive ninety minutes each week for class though and my dog can keep me company during class. We have video screens that hook up through the Internet at school and a monitor can manage different locations, maybe face to face would be nice.

554 blog beginning

I am a media specialist in pine city and am taking my technology certificate course. I moved my reviews to the discussion page if you was them here for 554. I am familiar with a lot of Web 2.0 tools but just don't have the time to keep up with absolutely everything. After I took my initial Web 2.0 program in earlier posts in the 23 things on a stick program a few years ago technology is progressing even more. Google wasn't even on the horizon back when I started this. We are now a google school and using weebly for our websites which has restarted my interest in learning more techie stuff.