Wednesday, August 8 marked our first day of school. The first day of our first year as a one-to-one school. All of our students have their own laptops; those who are buying or leasing from the school have Macbook Airs, while other students have chosen to purchase their own Mac laptop of whatever variety. (Our school's tech policy is located here. It's pretty long--40+pages)
So I was expecting glitches to happen. They did. During first period on Wednesday we were supposed to walk our students through signing up for our Moodle classrooms. Moodle is a course management system. It has tons of features. We as teachers did some minor training on Moodle this spring and we are expected to use Moodle in some way for our classes. Since I teach English, I plan to use this a lot. There are so many features that, once I get used to them, will make my life easier, especially in the sense of being paperless.
But enough explanation of Moodle. As I said, we had to walk our students through signing up for Moodle. In my first hour class a couple of kids couldn't get in, so I sent them to our tech director ASAP, as he requested. Before I go any further I shall state that I have four sections of a class called "Introduction to Composition and Literature", which consists of freshmen and sophomores. Teaching freshmen is an especially challenging task. One reason is that not only are you teaching the material, but you also have to train them how to be high school students. They make mistakes and do goofy things mostly because they are just clueless about the high school environment. So teaching freshmen takes a lot more energy than teaching the older high school students. Needless to say, walking these kids through signing up for Moodle took a little longer than with older kids.
Throughout the rest of the day there were still 2-3 kids in each class who hadn't gotten set up in Moodle for a variety of reasons. On Thursday and Friday there were still some students who weren't set up BUT I think everything is under control now.
Another glitch centered around the enrollment in the Moodle classes themselves. I and my colleague are teaching these Intro to Comp classes. Somehow I could only see the freshmen participants and he could only see the sophomore participants. The problem has been solved...our tech guy started 2 new classes from scratch. On Friday I walked students through a process of moving something from the original class to the new one. I asked the students to let me know if they did not have the new link, so I could let the tech guy know...he thought he had everyone in the right place but thought there might be a mistake or two. Fifteen minutes AFTER I asked this in one class, a student raised her hand and informed me that she didn't have the new link. Arrrgh!
Another "funny" happened with my Expository Writing class, which consists of juniors and seniors. I had given them an assignment in which they researched their names and wrote a short paragraph about the meaning of their names and how it fit their personality or not. They were to submit this assignment in Moodle. One of my students raised his hand and told me that after he clicked on the link to submit the assignment, the connection timed out, all his work was lost, and he didn't feel like redoing it. My answer was simple but probably harsher than it could have been. I told him that if he wanted credit he should redo it, and that the assignment was available until 4 pm.
Things actually have been smoother than I expected. Our network seemed to be handling the extra traffic and the students have been doing well with navigating the Moodle environment. Granted, it's just been 3 days in, but I'm really excited to see what we can accomplish with this new tool.
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