Blogs are great ways for students to express themselves, share their ideas easily with the class, and students can do it anywhere at anytime (provided they have an Internet connection). On top of that, it is a great way to integrate a little English into any subject. This semester was the first time Omar and I tried it with our students and it worked pretty well. While it seems like a no brainer of why creating a class blog is beneficial; there were a lot of details that Omar and I needed to consider before creating our class blogs. Read on past the break to find out what those details were and what we discovered.
Tag: tech in the classroom
Best of the Best: Windows Live-Online Word
Part two of the best of the best free word processing options is out! We will be heading towards the computing giant Microsoft and their free, handy, dandy online office suite which is part of the Windows Live applications. I’ve mentioned Windows Live before concerning the SkyDrive. I got to be honest. I wasn’t expecting too much from this web app considering Microsoft has not really pushed its existence too much. So, I was pleasantly surprised when I opened this Web App for the first time. Read on past the break to learn what I found, and I have pretty screen shots too!
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Ed Tech and Murphy’s Law
Student: “Sir! My pencil broke!”
Teacher: “Oh geez! Not again! Ok, go down the hall to the Writing Utensil Specialist” and ask her to reset your pencil.”

It was in the middle of one of my digital photo classes and my students were getting a little rambunctious. Naturally I got frustrated with their behavior, minutes later it dawned on me. It wasn’t them so much as it was the tech issue they were dealing with. They were to upload photos to our class blog and reflect on them. Of course, the network was not being kind to us and the uploads of very small resized images was taking a long time and in a few instances, they weren’t uploading at all.
Same day, Patrick has my lab checked out and has a videocomponent in his middle school tech course. He was having his own set of issues with compatibility and so forth. So while the kids were working on their video project, we cracked open a cold one. What?! No, it wasn’t a beer…although we could have really used one at that point. As we sipped Continue reading “Ed Tech and Murphy’s Law”