Okay, this week’s reflection is all orchids, and it’s not because everything went well, because it didn’t…
Scott McLeod on Dangerously Irrelevant asks about adult convenience vs. what’s best for the child. In my comments there I turned it into a cross tab, and talked about the combination of doing a lesson that is both inconvenient for you and not effective for the students. I opined that sometimes when you are trying something new, you take the risk of this occurring. That is what happened to me last week. I am doing a very ambitious unit project with my students that involves them planning a cross-country trip. I was trying to teach them how to research plane fares and rental vehicle rates. I did screencasts to show them how to do this. I made up a spreadsheet on Zoho, for them to add the pricing to. It was all for naught. Our school connections were to slow for the screencast, and the kids didn’t get it who did manage to see it.

I will have to sit one-by-one with the recorders for each of the groups and show them how to do this. It points up the limits of screencasts with elementary students, not to mention the need for more bandwidth in my district.  I’m not labeling this an onion though, because I have to try new and unique things, so it’s just back to the drawing board.

Behaviorally, the class is doing better, mostly because they are sitting silently for the first two hours of school doing state testing. The state in it’s infinite wisdom is poised to eliminate testing of second graders.  This is a good thing, but the post and article don’t mention that districts, at their expense, have the option of testing down to grade one. When I taught in Oakland, California, they did this. What was laughable was that because kindergarten is not mandatory, students would start first grade never having held a pencil and be expected to do a bubble test by the end of the year. I always thought the money would be better spent on making kinder mandatory myself.

I got a very nice note from Zoho about my earlier post on Bridging the Gap. I will not be able to check out Zoho until the weekend, but I thought such diligence deserved a quick post. If any of you have a comment on Zoho’s performance, let me know. I’m thinking I would like to try it out on one of Steve’s boxes. Here is the Zoho note: 

Hi Alice,

I just came across your interesting blog post ‘ Bridging the Gap’. Sorry that you found Zoho slow. Don’t know when you last tried Zoho but we did a performance upgrade to many of our services recently. Try Zoho once again and see how the performance is now. If you still feel it is slow, do tell us which Zoho service(s) you tried. This will help us address the issue.

Sorry once again for the inconvenience caused. I assure you that we will continuously strive hard in making Zoho better.

Regards,
Arvind
http://blogs.zoho.com  

Well, what did you expect from a teacher named Alice!?! I missed posting for Cybercompliment day, so here it is…

Here are the people who did the most to help me as I started to join the edublogging community. Their help was invaluable:

• Scott McLeod: He still talked to me even after I misspelled his name as McCloud, he responded to my request for a Skype conversation knowing little about me other than my enthusiasum. We don’t always agree, but he in unfailingly polite, patient, and gives me a valuable insight into administrators’ perspective through his posts, and the posts of others that he features. Thank you Scott for assisting with my professional development.
• Tom Turner: I was stumbling around and found DEN in December. I didn’t have unitedstreaming, and DEN was in chaos, but he was so friendly, and helpful answering my questions as I tried to navigate edublogging, etc. He was one of the first names on my blogroll. I love the DEN folks because they are so open even for those of us not in DEN, they are extremely inclusive. Hats off!

Other friendly faces along the way…

• Rick Scheibner: I like how he listens to my experiences, and shares his own in a really helpful way. Our many conversations have ranged from college baseball, to our students (both the beautiful and not so lovely parts of that).
• Doug Noon: This relationship is less personal, but no less important to me. Doug’s writing inspires me, and makes me slow down (a hard thing to do–trust me). I’ll say it again, I love this man’s “voice” in his writing, and envy it to. He is thoughtful, and thought provoking.
• All the folks at Edtech talk/WoW2.0/etc. : My family was starting to think I had my headset glued on for a while there, I was listening to so many webcasts. Thanks to all of you (Durff, Dave, Jenn, Jennifer, Jeff, Susan, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten a name or two).
• All the folks at edublogs.org. James, who listens to my petty tech problems, and actually fixes them, and is friendly. Cerebrealoddjobs who is unfailingly helpful. Mike Temple who has an awesome how to blog. All of you are an invaluable resource to me and others.
• Classroom20.ning.com: Still diving in there, but Steve and Gail have been great.

Okay, I’m sure I’ve left someone out, so sue me!

I spent a lot of time online the week before (Spring Break). Unfortunately, I have been doing more work for myself (stuff on professional development, job hunting, etc.) and did not get much planning and other work done. Not sure if it will be worth it, and I probably should have gotten out more often. The result is my new blogfolio. Part of this was probably because the week before break, my mother had fractured her leg in a biking accident, and spent a chunk of the week at my house.

I was tired, cranky, and ill-prepared coming back to work. In addition, it was not a “textbook” week, but instead I was having them do work on closing our current language arts unit, and doing review in math in preparation for the upcoming state testing. I felt both rolled/pulled thin, and crispy. Like deep fried wasa bread. Not good.

The light at the end of the week, was not an oncoming train. I had read the kids an opening story for our new unit on the preparations of the Corp of Discovery, and showed them the GoogleEarth kmz on the trip. They loved it, but were still hyper, so I had them write down at list of things they would need for a cross country trip. THEY LOVED IT! So I asked, is this what you want to do for your next unit project. YES! was the unanimous response. Now, I should have spent my Spring Break figuring out, hey what am I going to have them do after testing? I didn’t, and I discovered I won’t finish the final language arts unit as quick as I would like. Now I have a quicker start on the unit, and my project is underway. I’ve started a Google Earth map and I’ll add info/layers as it goes on.

This article from the Sacramento Bee features a local teacher using Google for Educators (following the propensity in news stories to focus on one individual, rather than covering a variety of people doing different things). Strangely, later in the article when they are discussing districts using technology, they don’t mention Sacramento City Unified, one of the two largest districts in the area?