I wonder what the average “hooked-in” rate is in most schools. I think 80% of the teachers are hooked in to the internet 80% of the day. Often that is a computer in the background where they check email every 30-40 minutes, do attendance, look up a student question, etc…
What is the percentage for students? Maybe 20% of students hooked in 20% of the time? Would teachers go crazy if they were only allowed to use a computer once a week or so?
We have been preparing for the year end Tech Fair at our school. As this is my first year at SHS I really have no idea what to expect. I do know that the Board of Education members visit along with some parents. I do know how to perform, however. So we are pulling out all the stops. Instead of signs pointing the way we reserved three laptops that will play student created Flash movies saying “Go this way!”.
We don’t have web server space at our school, a situation that proved difficult at the beginning of the year has largely become irrelevant. This weekend I read about internet start-ups in NewsWeek. So on Friday we tried out weebly. Weebly offers a seriously easy WYSIWYG editor and its free. It looks like any professionally created page.
This obviously has huge implications for curriculum. You can now blog, publish (Lulu), and have your own website. My students just took a year of web design so they were able to start their pages very fast. But I think any third grader could do this.
Check out our pages as they develop. The assignment for the tech fair is listed there as well.
It is Monday and my students are about to begin their final projects. I do feel they are becoming more and more independent as the year progresses. This is my first year at this school and my first year teaching technology. The hardest thing has been getting the pacing right.
I debated using Lulu as well for the final projects but I simply don’t have enought time left in the year. I think we will incorporate Lulu next year. I will probably put discussion of Lulu in the final exam and that might encourage students to explore it more. Free publishing is a hard concept to ignore.
