A day off is always a great time to seek balance in your life. However, we moved into a new chapter of our life with a new puppy on Saturday. Puppies bring joy to my heart, but also bring discipline to my words because I understand how easy it is to create the wrong dog by how you treat him.
This leads me into BYOT. What I've learned with second graders. After two days of dealing with technical problems I realize that students will be patient to use these devices. We had lots of moments to get upset, abandon the program, or this is not worth the hassle. I'm sure every new program goes through those moments, but the excitement of the students has sold me. On student's mother said, "She could not sleep last night she was so excited about bringing her ipod to school and using it in class." We must capitalize on that excitement and make sure we plan for engaging lessons with their devices. I'm not sure if the excitement is coming from being able to play games or the feeling of newness, but it's excitement about school in second grade. Second and third grades are the grades I believe we start losing students, so anything we can do to gain their interest let's do it.
I was finally able to get Socarative(a great classroom interactive tool for BYOT) working with about seven students, but conquering the technical issues was the hardest part of the day. We have come to the conclusions that some devices are not going to work on our network.
My orginal belief was that the students need to understand how to log in and how to understand wifi, etc... Not anymore that can come later. The next class the parents will have to come to a meeting to discuss, logging in to the network, teaching their child how to use their device, purchase some apps, and understand a 21st century learners responsibilities. We only had two parents attend our night time meeting, but we've had about 20 devices in two classes show up with signed permissions.
We've heard about the achievement gap but the technology divide is going to be the fastest than we ever thought about. Both issues are very obvious in our title one school.
Next steps:
I do not think our teachers really know what to do with the devices. They aren't sure how to integrate them into their lessons. Next goal is to help facilitate that with my two pilot classrooms.
Next week, I suggest grouping the students into centers with CAFE or math activities.
Technology Tuesday is working so far. I have the director of technology coming to speak tomorrow to help us with technical issues and discuss the counties technology goals. Also, I will talk with him about the twitter account for the school. The next week I'm going to invite just beginners for a 101 lesson on their device.
I'm excited about Edcanvas in Google Chrome for creating lessons and presentations. I've made Powerpoints, Prez's, and tried just about everything, but nothing is faster to create than with Edcanvas. If you use Google Chrome the site will give you access to google docs, you tube, and google search right on the site and then you just drag and drop. Unbelievably quick, looks great, and then with google chrome you can use it on any device. Edcanvas is worth a try!!
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