Blog Junkie

Needing data for my field study I have given both my classes a “pop quiz”.  Results appear to be very interesting, but I haven’t finished with comparisons etc…yet.  I need to move on to a new subtopic in our study of Nepal, but my data shows improvement is needed with student note-taking and transferring those notes to Inspiration.  What to do?

I have decided to use World Book On-line as it had more information on this particular subtopic than the previous on-line encyclopedia.  I have my “keener” class in the lab.  I pretested everything and it works fine.  Here we go with the assumptions again.

Some students end up with different home pages than I have and we take forever to get to the information required.  When I do finally get everyone on the correct page I find my “keeners” are way off-task!  This is starting to rattle my confidence.  What happened?  I forget how to teach every time I set foot in the computer lab?

It’s been a bad day, I need to read.  I am currently reading Writing for the Web 3.0 by Crawford Kilian, a communications teacher at Capilano College in North Vancouver.  I am reading his book to improve my blogging, hoping to write for an audience that currently does not exist!  In the book Kilian talks about reading on the computer.  How the low resolution of the computer screen affects reading.  The bells go off in this wee head.  I swear I think at glacial speed sometimes!

The next class is with the “hell-cats” and at the last minute I change plans which is always a risky move.  New plan is to print the section of the World Book Encyclopedia on-line, use it as a paper copy, use the overhead and the specialized note-taking paper. Problem: The print is waaaaay too tiny.  Solution:  Blow it up on the photocopier.  Still too small, but out of time to retype.  Went ahead anyway.  Cannot believe I can have so much trouble adding technology into my teaching!  Could anything go right the first time?  Oh yeah, that overhead.  It was the first one produced after the mimeograph machines went extinct! It was prehistoric!  Why use an overhead and not the computer/projector?  Can’t use a highlighter on the projector to demo the note-taking.

What happens?  They co-operate!  They actually listen!  We work through the first paragraph together and they manage to hold it together and almost finish the entire assignment even though you practically need a magnifying glass to read the thing!

What did I learn?  That Kilian was right, reading on the computer is hard.  These kids are not able to sit with a computer screen at arms length away.  They find the sentences too long, they cannot highlight the key words in the text.  They need to read on paper.  I am astonished at the difference.

Now to improve how to transfer the information from the notes to the Inspiration web.  Still grinding the glacier on that.