The netbooks seem to be working to some degree, although it feels awfully strange to be spending this much time (3 days and counting) on technical functionality and setup, and not language arts content. At this point, however, we simply must get all students on the same page. Once everyone's gmail and blogs work, we'll return to our regularly scheduled language arts programming.
Speaking of, here's what students can expect out of Quarter 2, in very broad terms:
LA 9 - We'll jump into expository writing. Quarter 2 will emphasize verbs, SAE in essays, and understanding and adjusting to the difference between expository and narrative writing. We'll also do some reading along the way, with some vocabulary thrown in for kicks.
Honors 11 - The 18th century is an incredibly interesting time in American history. In a mere 100 years, we went from a bunch of British colonies to an independent nation. Of course, it's far more complicated than that, with many players and agendas that don't often get much press, so we'll take a look at literature from that period. Be prepared to research historical literature, reading primary sources (or the closest we can get) as evidence of our contextual claims.
AP 12 - We begin the first steps of the fall semester's capstone project: the APA research paper. This paper will require several iterations, starting with a five pager, expanding to a 10-12 pager, and as a coup de grace, collapsed into a 2 page memo which students will actually send to law- and policy-makers.
But first, we must master technology. And so tomorrow and Friday, we work with Google Docs and Zoho.
Onward!
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Hey Paul, yes you have at least one person reading your blog. The netbooks sound great. If you ever need someone to bounch ed tech questions off of, let me know. I teach ed tech classes (and use a lot of tech in my non-edtech classes) at my university. I look forward to seeing how this all goes. Good luck!
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ReplyDeleteHey, Curby! Can you recommend any good (and free) wikis out there? I haven't played around with any but I know I'll require my students to create pages and presentations. . .
ReplyDeleteHey Paul, there are a couple of really good wikis out there that work well in schools. It looks like you are already having the students set up gmail addresses, which they can use to open other accounts. I would start by looking at Google Sites. They won't need another account/login information, and it's a pretty robust tool. I use it like crazy and encourage others to do the same. It enables collaboration, which is the whole point of a wiki. If Sites doesn't fit your needs, look at wikispaces (http://www.wikispaces.com) or PBWorks (formerly PBWiki, http://pbworks.com/academic-campus.wiki). They both have free access for schools and are pretty easy to use. Just like this here blogger, if you know how to send an e-mail, you can edit a wiki. I wish all of these cool tools were around when I was teaching k-12. Now I just get to tell other teachers about it. Let me know how it goes.
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