Monday, September 25, 2006

Stories from the classroom

I read a post from Doug Noon this morning in the midst of my frantic Monday morning routine. When you read something that rings so true to what you go through, to what you experience regularly, it makes you feel ok about the mountains you have to climb with your kids to get to the good places... Doug wrote in Monday Morning:

It’s been rough getting the kids ready to work on it at the beginning of the year. This is the first year that I’ve had something ready for them at the beginning (well…almost ready), but I’ve found that I also needed to get them ready for it. They need to learn a lot about working with a word processor. To keep things simple, I have them use TextEdit, which has all of its font and style settings hidden and out of the way. I want them to use it for its spell checking feature, which the website doesn’t do. I’ll show them some basic HTML formatting later. Right now, many of them are challenged with the problem of moving

the words around on the


screen, to get rid of the big spaces, and spellling. Oh, and file management is a huge problem. They lose their work. Or they label everything with their first names, or there’s no name. They forget to log out of the file server, and put their work in each others’ folders. They need a LOT of help.


I often worry and wonder about sharing the trivial day to day stuff that I go through trying hard to incorporate web 2.0 technologies in my third grade classroom. But then I realize there are not really that many doing what we are doing. All the more reason to share it, I guess.

My kids will hopefully post to their blogs by the end of the week. Right now (Monday night) they don't even know they have a blog. Miles to go, mountains to climb...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I laughed out loud at, Right now (Monday night) they don't even know they have a blog, and you're right. There aren't that many of us doing it. I think we need to write about how it is "down here," because this is where the foundation is laid.