First Week of School

We just finished the first week of school and what a whirlwind that was. Phew! I'm tuckered out. And what did we learn this week?

• don't let 5th graders make their own Edmodo accounts. Well let's just say that didn't go as perfectly as I had hoped. I was being overly optimistic and I didn't take them through the steps like I should. My mistake. Live and learn. I created the second class myself.
• don't make the needed copies of the schedule until you finish the first week of school. Yeah there were some errors and new versions had to be made. I only made one set. 
• I still haven't found the magic potion that gets students to put and keep their hands in proper typing position. Unfortunately some of them are getting really good at text typing so they transfer that to full keyboard typing and I must admit that some are pretty darn fast with two fingers. But we keep trying.
• Practice, practice, practice. We usually use typing.com for
  
  
  
  
  
  our keyboarding practice but for fun I had them go to ABCya and play the typing games their hoping something silly and easy would help them use the correct position. ABCya is a great site for educational games for K-5. I actually had 6-7-8 using the typing games also. I love typing.com because I can create classes and monitor or assign what I want my students to complete.
• I had a chat with the librarian and we decided to do a joint project after Christmas on the Iditarod. She was given a book called Granite by Susan Butcher  (you can find this book on Amazon) about a sled dog in the Iditarod. Very cool story. Have to start looking for resources. Found one already: Iditarod Just not sure what sort of projects we will do. Hmmm..... So be on the look out for more posts about the Iditarod.
  
• AND to top it all off, we are setting up a staff notebook inside of OneNote. It has been not without challenges. But it is going to be GREAT!

And so, the weekend, which so far has been non-stop rain, and back to it on Monday!

New Year Assessing

The new school year has started and I am in new territory. Which leads me to considering how I can assess what my students know since they are ALL new to me. I started using a few tools that are probably familiar to most computer teachers but they are new to me.

First I wanted to assess their keyboarding skills. Mostly looking at accuracy rates. Not so much wpm and I am not hovering over them to see if our hands are in the correct location although I did walk around and remind students to use the home row, thumbs on the space bar only, etc. For this I decided to set up accounts for my students on Typing.com. Teachers are able to create classes and easily import students. There are a series of exercises from Beginner to Advanced. The site keeps real time records of when they sign on and what they do. For the free side, which means ads on the page, it is pretty nice. I used this site for my 6th, 7th and 8th grade students. I will introduce it to 5th and 4th grade (maybe) within the coming weeks.

For 3rd grade I wanted them to just have fun typing and Typing.com does have games on it's site but you have to wait through a video ad and it just wasn't loading very well in our lab. So one class suffered and another class go to go to BBC Bitesize Dance Mat Typing. Really cute! The second class had a lot more fun with their typing! Since we just went and started from the very beginning it starts them on the home row. Slow for some but fun for all.

I also wanted to assess what my middle school students knew about Microsoft Word. Northstar Digital Literacy Assessment turned out to be pretty cool. No account needed and no cost to take the online assessments. Just pick a module at the bottom of the page and begin. I had my students do #5 on Microsoft Word. There is audio that goes along with the assessment reading the questions. When the students get to the end, their scores are available showing them what they passed and what they had trouble with answering. The site has a higher passing score than 70 and I had my students take it until they had a passing score. Quick and easy grade for me. The site was originally designed for adults to assess basic computer skills for work. But this worked great for my purposes.