Going Green

No this does not mean that I am becoming a MSU fan. But what it does mean I saved a bunch of trees and saved the school money and my self hours of grading papers this weekend and next week. Every marking period I get new students and that means correction any where form 100 to 150 safety test for each machine we cover in class. Those starting this marking period I had my students take their first test using their laptops by putting the test on Moodle. I have an hour or more putting each of my test into Moodle, but in the long run it will save me countless hours of grading and students like the fact that they get their grade right away. I am already coming up with other assignments that students can do using this tool to just eliminate the use of paper in my classroom. I have also noticed that it has a wiki feature that I might even try using.

New Wiki

I think I figured out what the problem was with my wiki. When I sent the request to join the class wiki I never received a response in my Gmail. So today well my students were working on safety worksheets I deleted my wiki and then made a new one and this time I used my yahoo account instead when I asked to join the class wiki. I now I shouldn't of been doing this during the school day but I had to do something. My new wiki URL is http://twork563.wikispaces.com/ and yes I got the class numbers in the wrong place I am just going to blame it on two things. 1. I was working on it during the school day. 2. My dyslexia kicked in at that time.

Usernames and Passwords

I do now that its getting very confusing with all the user names and passwords that we need to now to even get going every day. I think back ten years ago and I did not even need any of these then I started in the teaching profession. Know days I need then to log in to my computers, voice mails, e-mail's, wiki's, blog's and so on. When will it ever stop I personally think it going to get worse. The tech director at school sent the following link of an article about hackers. Because every year we need to change are passwords and people are always asking why.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/technology/21password.html?em

One of the thing that I have been doing is using the same user name and password for all of my e-mails, wiki's and blog's. I know that this is probably wrong but it sure helps remembering everything.

Wiki

When I go to my wiki page I have the edit button, but when I go to the class wiki and then my group wiki I do not have the edit button at either place. Plus my name does not even show up on the members list but it tells me that I have joined this wiki. I totally do not under stand what is going on Help! Help! Help!

Frustration (wiki)

Well I am getting very frustrated with the class wiki, when I go to our class wiki I am unable to edit all I can do is read it. I do remember joining the wiki, just not sure what is going on?

Well it looks like a very busy next couple of weeks. To start with are marking period ends this week and all grades are due by Friday afternoon students are still trying to finish up some of their projects do to the fact we had 4 snow days back in early December. Then on Monday I start with all new students in my classes and that means lots of safety test to correct plus. I think this semester I am going to use the smart board and are clickers for all test this way they will be graded instantly instead of spending countless hours correcting them.

My middle school has be selected for a site visit by the Michigan Schools to Watch Program (STW). A group from the STW will be visiting are school on February 1 and I have to put things about my program together for this visit. So it looks like I will have many late nights over the next couple of weeks but I am up for the challenge.

Laptop

Over the break from are ars last class I got a new laptop that's running Windows 7 can you say learning curve from using XP for the last 9 years. And yes you Apple users out their I did look at them but the price I could not justify and plus I was not sure if the CAD programs I want to run would be supported. Coming to find out that some of the programs we need for this class will not run on this machine because of windows 7 like Photo story and not quite sure about Audacity I got it to download but that's as far as I can get. So if all else fails I will have to put them on my desktop and I do have these programs on my school issued mini.

Well I finished reading the book last night. I will say that now I have a better understanding of what every thing is now and how it works. It seemed to take me a little long to read than I wanted to, because I have an 8 year old who is addicted to Super Mario Bros. well maybe both of us are I should say and by the way I am at world 8 with a little help from Luigi. find it amazing that a video game can take over every spare minute that you have in a day and should I say even the times when you should be doing other things. I still have yet to get the RSS feeds set up for every bodies blog as of last week Thursday.

Welcome back every body and I hope you all had a great Christmas and Happy New Year.