sharing – Re:thinking

November 1, 2009October 31, 2009

The day swine flu came to town

Up until a week and a half ago, I had really good attendance in all my classes. Lately there's been about 10-15% of students out sick. While it's certainly not a swine flu epidemic it's a trend that seems to be pretty likely to increase over the next month or so. There are schools somewhat nearby 1 who have shut down for a few days because over 40% of the students were out with the swine flu.

The problem

With our 10-15% absence rate, I've been receiving a lot more requests from parents for the work their kids are missing. I've been noticing that I'm spending a decent chunk of my planning time just getting together whatever classwork I can for the absentees. I greatly value my planning time for...well...planning. I don't like sacrificing it for non-planning related activities.

The solution

I have a class wiki where I post a weekly calendar. I also use it as a jump-off point for any online assignments or projects. I did not post every handout for several reasons: (a) it takes extra time, (b) it creates more clutter in an already hard to navigate Wikispaces file manager, (c) the vast majority of students don't use (or perhaps don't need to use) the additional resource.

However, a couple things have changed the last couple of weeks. As mentioned earlier, I've found myself spending a lot of time emailing parents of sick students and putting together handouts for them. Secondly, I've (perhaps a little belatedly) discovered the ease with which Google Docs lets you upload and share PDF documents.

The process

Whenever I print a handout or prepare a slide deck for my classes, I also save it as a PDF.
Upload the PDF to Google Docs
Share the pdf document so anyone with a link can view it.
Copy & paste the document's URL & link to it from my class wiki.
Relax as the email requests for class handouts can be answered with a quick, "The handouts you need are all available on the class wiki.2"
Bask in the parents amazement at technology these days.

Here's an example of a handout and a slide deck uploaded to Google Docs as PDFs in case you'd like to see what they look like.

_____

Holy cow. That article has more than a couple spelling/grammatical errors. [↩]
Of course I give a little more instruction than that. Also, when parents request to pick up the handouts in person, I also oblige. I realize not everyone has the internets at home. [↩]

September 26, 2008

A computing conundrum

I have a decision to make. I don't want to make it. I already know what I'll end up doing in the end. Think you can figure it out?

The situation

My new school has two laptop carts per floor. That works out to two classroom sets of laptops for every 20-22 teachers or so. They're brand new and not many teachers realize that they're working perfectly fine (98% of the time at least).

There's no check-out or check-in system. When I wanted them, I went to the teacher's workroom and rolled them on down to my room. I had no way of telling if they would actually be available until I opened the door to the teacher's workroom. I have no way of telling when other teachers would like to use them.

The options

1. Do nothing.

Pros: I could (in theory) just keep the laptop cart in my room unless people ask for it. I'd definitely be able to use the laptops multiple times during the week. With my seeming inability to accurately plan how long things will take, I wouldn't have to worry about not getting to that online activity on time.
Cons: (1) I'd be monopolizing 50% of the available computers to regular classroom teachers. (2) I'd have no idea how long other teachers would be using the laptops when they did take them (if they ever found out where I was stashing them, of course!).

2. Do something (i.e. set up a shared Google Calendar or the like for teachers to sign out the laptops)

Pros: (1) I'd know when and for how long other teachers would be using the laptops. (2) There would be the opportunity for more equitable use of the laptop carts for all teachers.
Cons: I'd lose my potential monopoly of the carts, and would more thank likely have to reduce the number of activities in my classroom that would require the use of laptops. Boo.

The laptop cart: currently hiding in my room

The real problem

We don't have enough laptops.

I wrote about a very similar topic in March while I was at Whitmore Lake in Michigan. Back then we had four laptop carts and a media center lab available for use between 22-25 teachers. Here I'm down to two laptop carts and essentially zero dedicated computer labs available for use for the same number of teachers.

I sometimes chuckle to myself when my vice-principal talks about how much technology is available to students this year.

So, take a guess:
What am I going to do? Something, or nothing? 😉