so, i 've just come from a meeting with our headmaster about availability of technology. i've written this before: our school blocks heaps of useful websites (bbc radio?!) and student computers have java blocked, which means, of course, that many many activities are simply not do-able. for example, i recently designed a level 1 research unit (year 11) on careers that included a surveymonkey online survey as well as future course planning using successmaker at kiwiquals. students could do neither of these things. the survey we had to forgo altogether, and the course planning had to be done via pen and paper (and yet more photocopying. sorry trees).
our headmaster is more than amenable to making changes, including students logging on to computers under their own log in rather than an anonymous "research" one, which involves having to save any online research to a shared folder, log off, log in again with a personal log in, then drag files out of shared into personal folder. if it hasn't been deleted by some knob in another lab somewhere on campus. which it often has, since they can do stupid things anonymously. however, we are now going to have a larger meeting with several staff, and i know that some of the long term male members will be reluctant (to put it nicely) to make the changes. i know, change IS scary. but it CAN be managed.
please, if your school offers free internet access and/or your students have java enabled on their computers, leave a comment below. any positive feedback would be very helpful. or, conversely, positive stories of dealing with the naughties would be helpful too!.
have a great weekend :O)
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