I'm Tired. I'm Frustrated. I'm Angry.

I can't believe it's been so long since I posted last. Or maybe I can. I'm tired. I'm frustrated. And I'm angry. I'm tired of not having reliable access to the internet at school. I have been keeping a diary for the last year of all the network errors I encounter during the course of the day, and there are so many! This is just when I actually want to use it (of course, typically when a lesson revolved around something required on the internet); who knows how much more often it actually is! I'm frustrated. I've skipped out on ICT committee meetings since this time last year, when I realised that I am the only department person who shows up regularly, and that the meetings accomplish nothing for students/staff. I attended the most recent, briefly, which mostly discussed how we're going to keep the kids from using the new high-speed broadband network. I understand that while much of this is the laziness factor on the part of certain people, a part of it is also financial, and that's frustrating too. I'm angry. Our department had a vacancy last year, and it was advertised as "leading the school in technology integration." Well, thanks for the kind words! However, the person hired was NOT impressed when they arrived (from overseas). They feel a bit hustled. I'm not surprised. I'm angry my students can neither download or upload files for their work, and cannot view youtube at all! Needless to say, this put the breaks on our film wiki project. I ripped my DVD and dumped it into the student data file instead, but what a pain! This is after we were all told off for having too much stuff in our department folders that the server couldn't handle. Well, what do they expect when students have no access? If the kids had access to youtube, they could watch the bit of the film they are analysing without taking up server space. I'm angry the network went down three days in a row during report writing week, for hours at a time (as it does EVERY reporting period). I mean, seriously. If the network can't handle the traffic when it needs to, shouldn't it be UPGRADED? Nothing like last minute pressure to meet report deadlines (NOT EXTENDED [understandably]) during exams, marking, and managing groups of boys who have sat their exams and are ready for the holidays but there's still two weeks to go! If you think I'm angry, spare a thought for those poor staff members who took time away from their own families to work on reports from home using our remote server, which promptly went down and deleted all their work. I'm angry, no, I'm still really, really PEEVED OFF at last year's frustrating episode that some of you will remember. But I feel I have no recourse whatsoever. I'm still so angry about this that I am retraining myself with the ICT curriculum (that's my PD for this year) and considering a change. A major change. This year I've had so little access that the time it takes to set up blogs, wikis, and keeping all of it updated all the time just doesn't seem worth it. And that's sad. What's also sad is how little I feel this year. I no longer go in early, and I leave every day by 4pm. It means I'm super busy when I'm there, but I'm simply not prepared to continue to give and give and give of my home time when nothing changes on the other end. I'm not attending any conferences this year, which makes me sad, but I cannot justify the expense from my household budget when there's no implementation afterwards. Guess what else is sad? I find I'm understanding more and more why other staff simply can't be bothered to get wired. It does take a lot of your time. It does require ongoing upskilling. But...they will not actually be using it in the foreseeable future. Heck, my room doesn't even really have heat, doesn't have any a/c, and definitely doesn't have any computers. I'm tired of fighting for access. I'm frustrated that people still see students using computers as "playing," and I'm angry that I'm not able to prepare my students for their futures. But heck, they can use a pen and paper like nobody's business!

QR Codes, Part Two

so, the kids were pretty rapt with the qr code; even my juniors, when they saw it, wanted to scan it and see what it did as well. i was thrilled to have them so interested in something going on in an english classroom. however, it wasn't without its bumps.

firstly, if the kids didn't have an android phone, they didn't have an app store (or, at least, not an icon labelled "app store" or "app market"). however, most of them had downloaded apps in the past, and knew how to get about it, and then we shared bluetoothing the links to each other so everyone could participate. i explained to them how when i chose my app, i used my laptop to see others' reviews of each app before i decided on which one i would d/l for myself, and encouraged them to do the same.

then came the next problem. most kids don't have plans. they spend their $10-$20/month on a text-only top up. that means that while they could d/l the app, they couldn't actually go to the site and use the flashcards on their mobiles, which was the intention ("class in their pockets"). one boy announced that in the course of d/ling the app (at home) he had burned through his whole month's top up - bound to be a telecom phone, that one!

so...if the kids can scan qr codes, but can't actually visit the site it leads to, how helpful is the qr code in engaging them? something more to ponder.

in related news, i found a whole bunch of qr codes on car mags my husband had brought home from the states last month, and our local paper had one last week in an ad, and so did the cinema! they are certainly getting everywhere.

what did you do last week?

Photographing Student Writing, a Trial

nz teachers recently spoke about photographing student writing on the ict in english listserv. this concept attracted me, as i love using my phone for pix, video, etc, and bluetoothing whatever to my lappy in seconds.  i thought it would be a nifty technique to trial, as i am currently thinking of how to revamp the writing programme at my school. i thought i'd give it a whirl this morning, when i was meeting with the scholarship students who were bringing introductory paragraphs on different texts. here's how it went:

7 am:  arrived at school.  in preparation before the students arrived, i took a trial photo of my own handwritten paragraph. in response, my phone locked up and wouldn't even let me access the list of photos. an urgent tweet (thank goodness for twitter!) resulted in a message of "connect your phone directly to your laptop with your usb cord & move all the photos off. the memory must be full."

7.10  hadn't gotten around to installing my phone's software on this laptop, but had the disk handy. installed the programme, connected the phone ... and nothing happened.  well, something happened. every technique i tried to move the photos, copy the photos, delete the photos, resulted in the same message:  "access denied." tried again without phone programme, just using the phone as another hdd with files. no joy.

7.20  fortunately, a student arrived 10 minutes early, armed with a bluetooth phone. we took a photo of his work and tried to push it to my laptop. my laptop could not "find" his phone, even though his phone found my laptop! repeated tries to connect failed.

7.30 the other students arrived, so i gave up.

reflection:  we did just fine this morning working "the old fashioned way."  however, as we each read our paragraphs, then passed them around to calls of, "can i see that?" i recognised how much easier it would have been to flick up each paragraph on the projector screen, with chunks of the original texts included for ease of reference. we would even be able to revise and keep all our work together in google docs, which will track the revision. and we wouldn't have to use up paper resources by printing copies of everything for each other.  i will be trying this again as soon as i manage to clear the 332 photos off my mobile - i am not daunted! looking forward to really giving it a go!

Movie Making, an update

i cannot believe it, but we have been editing our videos for 2 WHOLE DAYS! sorry to shout, but if you have visited here before, you will know that it took me 2 months just to get my kids access to movie maker AND have it work at the same time. i am so excited, i actually remembered to bring a camera and take some pix!

here are my brilliant sweeties, hard at work.

they look determined, eh?  we are getting short on time; i have to have the videos converted & on DVD ready to post THURSDAY. eeeek!

look at us, working collaboratively!

win or lose, my guys have done a fantastic job of creating their projects. i am very, very proud of them, and thrilled to death to have finally gotten together some tech that actually worked!

cheers,

kelly

NZATE 2009

the nzate 2009 conference was inspiring. i really enjoyed meeting you all and seeing you again at the different technology workshops.  i hope now that you're home, those of you who had your email addresses blocked will now activate your twitter, diigo, and blogger accounts and start participating! those of you who were able to access your accounts need to continue posting.  i look forward to hearing from you on twitter or here in the comments section.

i have collated all of those participants who had completed the process and inserted them into the slide that says "NZATE participants".  i sent the .ppt to nzate; it is also published in google docs and below.  you can see it in full screen mode by clicking on the square on the bottom right hand side, along with the speaker notes, which are simple, step-by-step instructions.

today i have uploaded another 160 bookmarks to diigo; i am tagging them and sharing them as quickly as i can.

remember, keep participating and contributing to web 2.0!

cheers,

kelly

Blogs and Wikis, an update

so...as i mentioned earlier this year, i am using blogs and wikis with my year 9 accelerates.  i feel a little like i'm floating through dark space without a connection to a mother ship, but i'm trying.  one never gets anywhere without trying (and failing), right?  that's what i'm telling myself, anyhow.  

my biggest concern is that i don't know exactly how my students should be blogging (is there a "should"?).  we have used our blogs for posting poetry and responding to questions from Knowledge4Africa, a site that offers English activities, among which were several poetic options.  (note:  K4A didn't have the actual poems, so i projected the poem from my laptop onto the board while the students answered the questions).  we have posted book reviews as well, and i also used a film study round-off activity on their blogs.  

most recently, however (and most exciting), we have recorded videos of them reflecting on their experiences at high school and in English for the first half of the year.  many of them come from a school with a school-television station, so they are pretty savvy about how they will edit their 1 minute videos.  i am looking forward to sharing some with you early next term.  i am NOT looking forward to the editing/posting of the videos, which thus far in my experience has been a painful and ultimately unfruitful pain in the arse. however, by putting this task in the hands of my students rather than my own, i hope to see successful video uploading. you can peek at our homepage here.

we have also used a wiki this past term for collaborative learning of our film study.  firstly, students were allowed to vote which film they wanted to study.  as long as it had a suitable rating (and it wouldn't make me feel like i was having my teeth drilled to watch it over and over again), i was willing to use it.  they chose Hot Fuzz, and since i adore simon pegg, that wasn't a problem.  

the wiki is only in "draft" form at the moment - i plan to use this holiday time to review their pages, and we will formalise it together during our revision during term 4.  i am wondering how much "amending" i should contribute to the wiki.  if you have used wikis, i would love to have your input on how much contribution you make as facilitator. right now everything you see is student created.

i can't really tell you right now if this experiement has been "successful", especially as i'm not sure what comprises being successful at this point.  what i can tell you is that i have been excited to see a large (30) group of students focused on their work and working collaboratively to direct their learning.  it has been exciting watching them want to do, and doing, more than what is asked, as they come pre-skilled.  and it has been exciting watching them be thrilled with coming to English (something i don't get from my seniors).

i have been fortunate.  this class is timetabled when the best lab at school is avialable, so i haven't had the frustration of dealing with unavailable lab time, difficult to manage mobile laptops, or downright frustrating library computers.  and i am grateful.  

i am aso fortunate enough to have toni twiss, technological mothership, coming to assist my department next term.  i can't wait, and i'm sure my students will be most fortunate to have the benefit of the time spent with her.

now i must stop procrastinating and get back to my NZATE 2009 conference presentation!  have a happy winter holiday.

History of the Computer

a few months back doug belshaw (https://twitter.com/dajbelshaw) tweeted that he'd just blogged (http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2009/01/25/my-computing-history/) his computer history, and asked others to do so in a reply to his post. having a think, i decided that i would reply to doug (who's only 28) and here is what i wrote:
=============================================
>>now i feel very old! i started using a computer for work as an admin assistant back in 1985 (that excludes the electronic "word processor", hahaha, that replaced my typewriter). we had DOS in those days, and had to learn word perfect, wordstar, and a variety of now defunct word processing programmes. the printer was a monster that was so loud we couldn't answer the phones when it was printing a document. then i moved on to spreadsheets. way before point and click to adjust things like font size, column width and the like, we had wissywig (WSSYWG if i recall correctly) to make them look "pretty", uh, aesthetically pleasing, for printing. i'm sorry, i can't remember the name of the spreadsheet program i used before excel came out. still, it beat typing and having to line up all those figures, though getting half spaces was a bit of a challenge.

before the invention of windows and the mouse, most people in my position had to familiarise themselves with DOS to work out any glitches, install new programs, etc. in addition, we had to modify our word docs with codes, such as "hold down CTL, SFT, AND F3 for italics" (not an exact match - those days were long ago and i don't remember!). ah, those were the days. not. i had to have a cheat sheet of all those damn codes and the highlight code didn't always work properly, so editing text took a long time and caused a lot of anxiety on deadline.

my first home computer came in 1991. it was almost bigger than the cheap warehouse stationery desk i'm sitting at now, weighed about 30 lbs, and had a monitor screen 5 times smaller than the monitor casing itself. it used those, what were they, 5" floppy diskettes? eye-straining orange text against a black background. a friend cobbled it together for me, so it wasn't any particular brand. started using the net not too long after. bulletin boards were already huge back then. i even belonged to a daily listserv for one site that updated everyone's comments daily in a single email, which seemed incredible i learned html thanks to the university i was teaching at by then, around 1997-8 if i recall correctly. that was heaps easier for a non-programmer like me. we had a real-time chat available for student assistance, in conjunction with a bulletin board where students could post their work in advance, and that seemed so far out!

as for moving up with the times, i traded in the cobbled together deal for a second hand apple something in 1993. no offense apple folks, but i hated it. when anything went wrong, it would simply shut down with a frown-y face on the screen. coming from DOS, where you could get out of the programmes and fix it yourself with a good manual, i found this need to run to the repair shop every other week frustrating and threw the damn thing out about 6 months later after it froze up for the umpteenth time. ended up with another desktop gigantor until i got my first dell around 1997/8. why dell? they offered a good deal for what i wanted. it cost about $1800, and that was sans printer or any of the extras that are standard now.

never had one problem with the dell, but upgraded to an HP desktop in 2000 (for the princely sum of $700), then traded that in for a variety of laptops in 2005. went through a laptop a year until i found toshiba. am now using a toshiba satellite with windows XP provided by the ministry of education for a mere $45/quarter which is updated every 3 years, to which i've added a variety of software that suits my purposes (and at my cost). am very loyal to the brand, as even though i've had some minor annoyances (disk drive sensor not reading, LAN not reading), they are tough as nails and can take the abuse i dish out, lugging it to school every day and from classroom to classroom (and i once stomped on a fit of rage - silly, i know, but it continued to work just fine! even the screen didn't crack! - oh, that was one i bought personally , not a moe one, lol). here at home we each have a laptop (about $NZ1K) and wireless broadband internet ($arm & leg here in NZ). love the freedom, and the ability to look up anything i want to know at anytime, anywhere.

even though technology sometimes drives me bats, i certainly do not miss the days of carbon paper and white out sheets, and i especially love not having to type papers over a zillion times to get the footnotes spaced correctly! plus, as an american living abroad (sorry for all the miscellaneous spellings), keeping in touch with family and friends with webcams, blogs, photo sites, and skype is a real blessing for us. i use my laptop for everything - planning lessons, creating resources, letter writing (i still write regular letters in addition to email), managing my husband's business, and i'm on the net about 6 hours a day! every day i show my students a new website that may interest them, and i use a social networking site to keep in touch with them and offer outside of class quizzes and the like. i love powerpoint for class presentations, especially for poetry and film, and can't live without WinDVD (the pay-for one that captures stills). i also love access to online music, which i listen to at home on my lappy, even though i don't own an mp3/4 player of my own yet (dd's got an ipod though, as well as a $35 mp3 player, which has been less hassle than the ipod, sorry again apple folks). this year my students will keep a class blog, and i am investigating a class wiki, but one new thing at a time, eh?

thanks for bringing back memories doug! and i found you via twitter, another modern social media tool i really enjoy :O)<<
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3 months down the road, i have finally bought a smartphone, and am enjoying listening to my mp3 files on it, though, of course, the damn bluetooth isn't working! there's *always* something, eh?

i had (read: paid) a student in over the weekend to help me convert files and edit. he fiddled and faddled and got my lappy & new phone doing everything i wanted ever so much quicker than i'd be able to, for which i am VERY GRATEFUL ANDREW! :O) now i hope to find the time to actually do the video thing now that's it's workable, which has been my goal for nearly 3 years now!

in the meantime, something else i'd like to comment on is online bookmarking services. while i know i've mentioned this before, and many more people are using them now, i'd like to repeat how convenient they are. i visit sooooo many sites everyday from my rss feed, or twitter, or several other ways, and most of them i'd never visit again without delicious or diigo to keep them organised for me. if you aren't using an online bookmark service, visit delicious.com or diigo.com (at diigo you can organise your bookmarks by both tags and categories). you can organise, share, and even add others to your network to get their bookmarks as well, but you can access them from any computer anywhere. don't you hate it when you're travelling and have to use a friends, or an internet cafe, and then can't remember a site? well i do! online bookmarks solved that little dilemma. just add a bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar and you're set to go! if you'd like to visit my bookmarks, you can at delicious.com/kelfaulkner or http://www.diigo.com/user/kiwispouse

So...What Happened?

backstory in a nutshell: we started the school year with more internet blocking than ever, thanks to a new non-school internet blocker that blocked everything by category, so we had no access to news, media, music, radio, etc.

we finally had a meeting at the end of week 3, with our headmaster and all the people concerned about the problems with access at school, which totaled about 12(on a side note, i have spent 2 days now helping a senior master get his laptop working at home!)

our headmaster is so good; he is serious about our needing to be part of the 21st century and not the end of the 19th. he asked everyone what we cannot get to that we need (HUGE list!), and what we thought we should do about our current lack of access (at least go back to last year's settings). he also asked if students could be hurt by unlimited internet access, which, of course, is yes. the internet, like everything else in life, needs to be taken with moderation and a grain of salt, and exposure to porn, whether wittingly or not, is abusive.

the net result is that we have our access back, mostly. there are selected sites blocked, such as trademe and facebook and bebo. while i would prefer total access (trademe's message board is a great way to reach a wide variety of people to fill in student surveys on surveymonkey; students' own facebook or bebo blogs would be convenient for blogging, as well as teaching them that their online profiles affect their lives in more ways than the obvious), i can live with it. we are also installing a programme (forget name) on teachers' computers so we can see what are students are working on; essential when you can't be everywhere at once.

my question at the end of the day is: if watchdog, the school internet blocking tool provided by the ministry of education, is doing *its* job, why is it our individual school's responsibility to do more than the ministry by using a second blocker that blocks everything else via tags/categories? and why does the it tech have say about what teachers teach? what do you think?

Network Blocking ARGH!

so, i've been so darn angry the last two weeks that i haven't bothered to write about it, hoping the situation would resolve itself. well, it's not going to resolve itself, and i just have to vent before making an appointment to speak with the headmaster.

last year i attended Ulearn08 with our headmaster and some other folks from my school. the net result was that this year we were going to have open internet access, among other cool stuff. well...

i came to school after our (too short) summer holiday and plugged in the network, used google chrome for various things, then went home. when i plugged my computer into my own modem, i couldn't load chrome, as "your network administrator has blocked your access to proxies. see him" (that's a paraphrase) came up. thinking it must be the browser i used, i tried internet explorer, only to find that the connections tab was missing altogether! i rang our NA at home, and he, wisely, neither answered nor returned my call. i was absolutely livid.

the next day i went straight to him, and was told that it was "possible" for a student with a laptop to access our proxy and use up our internet time. he added, "the ministry provides laptops for work, at work". he then tempered that with the info that he had only changed the proxy access on IE, and that chrome "must be borrowing the settings from IE, tell it to change them properly; then, d/l firefox, which should work fine for you at home".

so, downloaded firefox, which does work fine at home, BUT...

EVERYTHING is blocked! first, we couldn't access any video sites, then radio sites, now sites on metaphors, and today i couldn't even open my payslip in google docs! it's gotten so ridiculous i would be speechless if i just weren't so angry!

>>Site blocked. www.nbc.com is not allowed on this network.
>>This site was categorized as:
>>Television
>>Questions? Not properly categorized?

look, i get that school doesn't want staff hanging around on tradme, but come on! half of the english curriculum in nz is media studies! without access to media, how am i to teach my classes? and not using my laptop at home? where do they think i actually do MY work, after teaching all day?

and the idea that a student will use up all our allowance? c'mon! i've only ever seen 1 student here with a laptop, and he was a top boy! seriously, what is the percentage?

oh, and then to add insult to injury, on thursday all staff received an article in our inboxes, from the _principals' digests_, entitled "using the potential of facebook, youtube, and myspace" (none of which we can access, of course)! it carried the reports of a study, which i'm sure you've seen by now, with a vision of student today, and recommended: consideration of social networking sites for staff as well as classrooms, harnessing the educational value of chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs, and wikis, "ensur[ing] equitable access", and so on. was that supposed to be a joke? were they kidding? are they laughing in their offices about how frustrated we are?

the new nz curriculum calls for teaching students how to live in their future, utilising technology students use in their everyday lives. how can we do that if we, the teachers, do not have access? while i had planned a variety of exciting units for this year, at all different levels, i am seriously thinking of bagging all of them and simply using "chalk and talk". running into gigantic problems every time i want to do something new and relevant is becoming too big an obstacle. i am very close to giving up.

Getting the Techonology We Need

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)

ARGH!

it seems like this technology business has more barriers than doorways.  with a barrier in front of each idea, it's no wonder teachers are slow to catch the technology train.  it's simply so much easier to keep doing what you've been doing instead.

i'm still in the process of having the year 9's research their topics to create newsmaker reports.  one of the technology problems is that our students are only allowed access to the internet via an internet log in (same for all).  any info they want to save needs to be put into a file, saved to that drive which is cleared every day (and different depending on which lab they are in), then they must log off, log in as themselves, and drag the file to their documents folder.  from there they can do what they wish - print or whathaveyou.  it's very time-consuming and aggravating!

problems with computers:  firstly, i don't have access to a lab during this class time.  prior to today, we have spent 3 days trying to do internet research (this is after print research, which we have already completed).  the first day the art projects were on display in the library in the computer section, which i booked over a term ago, and we could not access them.  the second day in the library computer section, none of the listed passwords would work.  the third day i got the mobile laptops instead, and the last person to use them hadn't plugged them in, so they were dead. ::pulling hair out::  three lessons down the gurgler and no research completed!

additionally, in all my wisdom (haha), i had decided that students could find the video of their choice (the group has a 20 second max video choice they can include in their news report), edit it in moviemaker as homework, and then email it, and any photos they wish to use, to their group leader, who would do the collating and make final decisions.  well, they can't access email on the school computers due to java, which is blocked on student log ins.  that means boys who live in the hostel have no email available to them at all.   ::sigh::  so for any, or what little video/photos we will have, i must handle the organisation of them all myself - what's the point of that exactly? to use up what little time i have on trivial matters rather than on the teaching of bigger issues, such as critiquing reputable sites?

my goodness, i could go on, but i think you get the point.  for every action, there is a (negative) reaction that results in very little being done, except for the creation of a very large headache.

so my questions today are:  how does your school handle internet access?  do all students have full access that they are responsible for, and a solid disciplinary measure for the few who are naughty?  do your students have java and full functioning programmes?  have you ever had a problem where a site has corrupted, via java, your network?  these are some of the questions i'd like some feedback on before going in to discuss this with my school group.  did you have to fight the good fight to get to where you are today (tech-wise), or was your school on board from the get-go?

thanks so much for any feedback!  i'm going to go outside, enjoy the sunshine for half an hour, and relax!

Newsmaker

my goodness i'm behind.  senior exams are looming, and with 12 class meetings to go before they go on study leave, i am like a one-armed paper-hanger.  at an all-boys school, teachers are innundated with plenty of last minute "what can i do to pass" conversations with students... but enough of that.

after ulearn (and i thought the ulearn twitter page was great!), i am more envigorated than ever at using technology in the classroom.  my headmaster bought newsmaker http://www.aboutnewsmaker.com/ for me, and i am trialling it with my low-level year 9 boys for their research projects.   as i'm only using the starter pack this term, i am flying blind, but i figure at least class will be interesting!  combine untested technology with a headmaster observation and you get...an ulcer!  anyhow, i've split my class into groups, with one member being the boss.  i meet daily with the bosses and instruct them for that day's lesson, and then each boss has to instruct their own group.  so far (4 meetings), we have only brainstormed topics, narrowed the focus, and obtained one written source.  today we will use the laptops (hoping that today, perhaps, they will actually work) to find at least one credible online source.

the overall goal of the assignment is for each group to present their formally traditional research project as a news report.  http://www.aboutnewsmaker.com/HowTo.aspx they will record themselves presenting on a webcam on my laptop, then add one no-longer-than-20 seconds video clip, and whatever photos/sounds they wish, with each student speaking for 1 minute about one aspect of their findings, hopefully culminating in a coherent news report.  

if we can do this satisfactorily, i will post the best one or two for critiques/comments.   this is my first time trying anything like this, and without my own experience, i am scared to death, but if i don't get out and just do it, it'll never happen, so i'm just jumping in feet first.  bell's rung - gotta go!

Thank Goodness for Technology

well well, it had to happen - it always does, doesn't it? yes, a nasty virus came down the network and infected my machine, even with avg 8.0 and spybot. tech wiped the hard drive, so i lost EVERYTHING on it, and if i hadn't been playing around with technology over the last couple weeks, i'd be devastated. i've always been pretty good with backup - almost everything work-related is saved, except for the 2K music files (how will i ever remember what to download?), and several documents i've made over the last month or so. plus, of course, all pictures and bookmarks are gone, gone, gone.

but i'm saved by tech! all *important* photos - birthdays, celebrations, holidays, had all, just in the last fortnight, been uploaded to picasa! all bookmarks, in both browsers, had been saved to delicious! and the bulk of my teaching materials, though not on the network, had been saved to a flashdrive! all my fave videos? in my online faves on youtube! my email address book? saved in mozbackup!

so what have i learned? firstly, to get off my duff and go out this weekend and buy that external hard drive so *everything* can be backed up, so as to save myself time and heartache the next time (and you know there'll be a next time - it's inevitable). i've learned that while new technology may be time consuming at the beginning, it's worth the time i'll save now, and the next time and the next time, having to restore everything. i didn't even have to repair my igoogle page, as when i logged into gmail it popped everything back up just as it was.

*whew*!

Neoblog - A Teacher's Adventure

alrighty! this blog is my attempt to document my experiences as i learn to use more ict and in turn use it to teach in my english class. please do not talk to me about being a teacher and not using capitals. genre counts - blogs are personal diaries, and i can write however i feel like expressing myself at the time :-P i'm keeping this blog to follow my progress, as i have found using ict in the classroom not only time consuming, but frustrating. as a full time working mother, wife, and individual in my own right, i don't have blocks of time that equal hours and hours to get something to work properly, to download, to whatever, and the lines here in nz are particularly archaic, especially when compared to the speed of dsl in the states, which is where i'm from. however, once i've let the frustration pass, i'm usually game to keep trying. i have lots of what i think are cool ideas, and i want to learn how to implement them. this'll be learn-as-i-go.

let's give you some background. i've always thought of myself as computer literate. started using a computer as soon as they came out, learned a lot of programmes (remember wordstar?), learned DOS, as the university where i worked went online, i learned html, etc etc. i have taught in virtual classrooms, and other classes completely over the net. however, as computer life is like dogyears squared, and i went on to have marriage and family, i found myself further and further away from what is happening now. i do have an online life, and visit various bulletin boards to participate in dialogue about myriad topics on a regular basis. i really enjoy learning about new things from my online friends, and encourage anyone reading this to pass on any sites/tools/whathaveyou you think may be helpful, useful, or simply downright interesting.

currently i teach high school english at a boys' school, so the average age of teens i work with is 15. i am keen to use technology in the classroom, and hopped on the powerpoint bandwagon immediately armed with windvd. i have been teaching myself the basics of ripping and burning, but still have trouble with sound - i want to embed short film clips in to powepoint for lessons to avoid fooling around with two tvs and two dvd players when i'm teaching homage. i have a data projector in my room, mounted on the ceiling, but find that despite the curriculum's call for ict as the way forward, let's face it, school's don't actually have the money to provide the tools for its use. i would love for moving images to be part of what we create - but cannot book a lab at the right times, or have access to appropriate programmes for students to do so. i recently wanted to do what i thought would be a great lesson on women in media - as portrayed in hip hop videos, but spend the bulk of a saturday fooling around downloading video, converting it, then attempting to edit it, with no success - loss of syncronicity in video/sound. i have used both computer labs and student laptops only to find that what i can do on my computer, they cannot do on theirs - no java for students. half of our research project went down the tubes when they could not access surveymonkey or use the kiwiquals successbuilder tool. and that's when the computers work properly in the first place - i cannot recount how many lessons have devolved into chaos from 1) no power, 2) no internet connection, 3) student log ins not linking to the acutal network so they can save their work, 4) students being unable to print from the hostal computers and unable to save that work to the student drive, on and on ad nauseum! bah humbug!

so where do i stand? i love teaching film, static images, and unfamiliar text - the computer is great for that. i use the projector for notes, poetry, and a variety of other things. but i want to dabble more in what my students are doing. i belong to bebo, which is the netoworking site most of the kids here use, and utilise my site to keep a relationship with the kids, as well as provide some study tools for them to use during study leave. i'm keen to help encourage my colleagues to embrace ict, and if i can figure out how to do it myself, i can show them the easy way, and hopefully get more people with the programme. i want to do what i can to lobby my school to provide necessary features to our computers so students can do meaningful work.

i am out of time, so that it all for today!