This school year started out as they all do. Full of excitement, anticipation, and new ideas for the classroom. Additionally, I was starting my position as technology coach for my school, and receiving a class set of iPads and an interactive whiteboard for my classroom. I had previously had iPads for the classroom but they were shared with other staff members. This year I was being given a set exclusively for my classes, and as a result, could customize them with the apps that would allow me to move toward the redefinition stage of my curriculum (based on the SAMR model) in my freshman English and Media Studies classes.
In addition to my classroom technology, our district moved all student accounts to Google Drive this year so I was excited to shift toward a paperless classroom with the added benefits of more seamless peer to peer, and teacher to student collaboration. Google Drive allows me to provide students timely feedback on their written assignments by providing comments and embedding links into student work that direct them to websites that provide information and sometimes activities that can help them understand the concept with which they are struggling. For instance, I am writing a run-on sentence now which is a common problem for my freshmen as they do not often proofread their papers so I am creating a link within this run-on sentence that will guide them to a website that provides information on what a run-on sentence is and how it can be corrected. Cool, useful and engaging things are afoot! Right? Well, not just yet.
In order to embark upon this technological journey I needed my students to create accounts on several websites including Twitter, Vocabulary.com and Kidblog.org. Easy enough? Not so fast. My Utopian vision came to a screeching halt when about half of my students had never created an online account before. Consequently, they did not understand the process, nor did they have the the requisite e-mail account necessary to create accounts for most online services. This then created the issue of having to create e-mail accounts that need to be confirmed through a verification code sent via text message to students who did not have cell phones. So much for the "students are the digital natives" theory.
Once the students had e-mail accounts, at the very least, they began creating accounts for the other services I had intended on having them use. When I was confident that the overwhelming majority of my students had created accounts for the various websites, we could now begin our exciting new journey on the technological seas. Right? Not so fast. Let's put it this way: On a Wednesday afternoon, "kitty831" might seem like a perfectly logical password to a fourteen year old girl that was just watching cat videos on YouTube; however, come Monday afternoon when the feel-good feline vibes are no longer present, the password has vacated her consciousness as well.
At least I had another teachable moment. Monday's lesson soon changed from "understanding complex and compound sentences" to "selecting safe, memorable passwords and how to retrieve them when necessary". In the end, it realistically took over two weeks before my classes were close to being fully functional on the learning websites we would soon be using. Now could I begin creating the dream outlined in the first two paragraphs of this blog? Not quite. To be continued...
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