We are three weeks into the school year and I am waist deep in my first big project.
I have learned two new things already:
- Projects can be a bit messy
- Older students are eaten alive with jealousy when the younger group gets to do something cool that they didn’t do
My 7th graders are matched with a school in Sydney, Australia and will be creating a wikispace on modern slavery in the world.
I am really excited about it, but I had to accept that in order for them to complete their class introductory voicethreads that they would have to be let loose in the school to take their pictures. Messy. Not neat, quiet, controlled.
I uploaded their pictures to my online Picasa album and in a literal instant they had them copied from the Internet into their student laptop folders. They logged into Voicethread in the next instant, and were ready to upload their pictures. It didn’t work. The laptops don’t have Flash and the alternate student Internet had blocked the site. More messy. Alternate plans necessary. They logged into my Moodle course and completed the review of our recent section so the time wasn’t lost.
Hardware hurdles are an exercise for the teaching mind…especially when I know the easiest, possibly least acceptable answer is, “Bring your own laptops in and let me go grab a handful of ethernet cables from the server room. We’ll be done in no time!”
