September 11, 2013

I am starting to think technology hates me. The Chromebook charging issue yesterday and today, my projector is defunked and not working at all whatsoever. It needs to be replaced, so my beautiful powerpoint lesson is completely done for. What am I to do??

However we did, with the first class get into the Chromebooks and things worked well- with a couple minor issues: one of the track pads wasn’t working. One of the Chromes hadn’t charged at all. One of the kids has an account that is all in Arabic now.

An hour later, my projector was swapped out so that I can use my powerpoint with my class, however then I go to play the video and the sound is coming from the ELMO input while the computer screen is on another input. My crazy technology life!

However despite the technical issues, the Chromebooks went splendidly last class and I hope they will for this class as well!

During my planning block today I started working more on my planning and keeping my blog for the kids for every day. I discovered that you can save drafts and not upload them which really helped me in my thinking about how to get the kids the digital information for the day! I think it’s only going to get stronger as we move and as I get stuff digital and into Drive. I really have to work on that and how to work things out- putting links to drive documents in the blog will be key!

But I started doing planning however it is like being back in my first year all over again. I have to rethink what I do in class and I decided I was going to make a copy of each packet for the units labeled CHROME so that as I digitalize, I can mark down what is not necessary so that I don’t photocopy tons of stuff next year. Already there are a few pages that seem silly to have that I don’t need. I wonder about the vocab sheets as well, should these just be digital now? I’m not sure- this will be an interesting year of straddling the known and the unknown. I feel as if we should play the X-Files theme as I plan. That is the tone of this year: the X-Files. If I were an X-Files fan, I could go into a long drawn out analogy or metaphor where I quote Scully and Mulder or name episodes of the show, but the ideas of aliens freaked me out so I never watched. Sorry! I’ll just make stuff up from now and pretend like I know what I’m talking about!