September 5, 2013

A friend who has a Chromebook texted me the other day and asked how I was enjoying it and getting used to it. I told him I hadn’t had much time to play with it since I’d been doing so much other stuff. He said I should start using it as my laptop at home so I knew what I was doing but I wonder if it’s possible to do all I do on the Chromebook.

This year will have a huge learning curve for me, as it always has, when trying to learn something new. I believe my goal is to have at least one thing on the Chromebooks to do each class, no matter what it is. I think some days this will be easier than others but that is my goal. I have been working on my blog and sharing files with the kids. I set up the blogs so that I can post what they need to do every day and an excel file shared with them for a running log of the journal topics.

I debated a lot about the journals and whether they would go digital or not. The main reason I decided that not all of them will be digital and that the kids will need a composition notebook for their nightly journals. I’m going to give the kids the option of keeping a digital journal to share with me instead, however there could be kids that really don’t have access at home and I don’t want them excluded. Additionally, I really believe there is something to sitting with a pen in your hand, a connection to yourself and the words you write. I will be asking for the composition book instead of the spiral because the spirals are too hard to carry home all the time!

However my starters in the beginning of class will hopefully all be digital- that is my goal to start the year. At least my starters can be digital but I need to find other things online to use to collect data from the students, other ways to collect answers. I’d like to use Today’s Meet and other things to do this. These are a few of the things I’m thinking of tonight, a half an hour before bedtime.

Tomorrow morning I will not be using the Chromebooks. I know the other teachers are beginning right away but I still want to put forward respect and dignity before we pull out the technology.