Well, once again, not much new. My weekend was pretty boring. I had fallen behind with grading, so I spent about 11 hours grading stuff yesterday. Today I hung out, surfed the web, and took a long nap. I still have a ton of other stuff to do around the house.
I started having kids email their assignments to me at Yahoo. It has been going pretty well. Hopefully I will be able to grade things with a faster turnaround time. I can grade things as they come in, rather that wait for the end of a chapter and then drag 150 floppy disks around until I catch up with grading. The kids have a high comfort level with email, and check it frequently. They never read notes I left on their floppies, but I've sent kids emails in class saying I'm missing an assignment, had them email me the assignment, and I've checked it and emailed them back a grade in a minute or two. Helps me to find slackers and correct problems more quickly.
One thing I would like to do is email assignments to kids. What I would do is create a basic spreadsheet, for example, and then email it to the kids with instructions on how to format it and such. After they complete it, they could email it back to me.
The other thing I think I will play around with is emailing tests to the kids. I figure I can put the test on a spreadsheet, and then when they come back, I can paste a sidebar which will uses Excel functions to grade each item, and show total, percent and letter grade at the bottom, which I can then return to them. I've already experimented with it and it works. This way, not only can I grade things faster, but the kids get more feedback on which questions they got right or wrong. I hate spending time in class going over tests! I'm going to try this with one of my classes, and I'll do it with all of them if it works.
I like this email idea, because it's robust. More robust than the printers and floppies. The floppies suck, and are always breaking. The printer jams all the time. I've had assignments that were predicated on having everyone do something and print it, and the printer jams, and the kids are whining, and I spend the whole period trying to fix the printer, the the kids keep hitting Print, Print, Print, Print-so when you finally fix the printer, you sit watching Jenene's assignment print out 30 times, and the bell rings, and suddenly EVERY kid swears they did the assignment, but couldn't print it. Ugh!
This year in school, I've experimented with many different ways of doing things, which has been time consuming, but I've found some good ideas that hopefully will save me more time in the future. All I know is, I'm beat!
I started having kids email their assignments to me at Yahoo. It has been going pretty well. Hopefully I will be able to grade things with a faster turnaround time. I can grade things as they come in, rather that wait for the end of a chapter and then drag 150 floppy disks around until I catch up with grading. The kids have a high comfort level with email, and check it frequently. They never read notes I left on their floppies, but I've sent kids emails in class saying I'm missing an assignment, had them email me the assignment, and I've checked it and emailed them back a grade in a minute or two. Helps me to find slackers and correct problems more quickly.
One thing I would like to do is email assignments to kids. What I would do is create a basic spreadsheet, for example, and then email it to the kids with instructions on how to format it and such. After they complete it, they could email it back to me.
The other thing I think I will play around with is emailing tests to the kids. I figure I can put the test on a spreadsheet, and then when they come back, I can paste a sidebar which will uses Excel functions to grade each item, and show total, percent and letter grade at the bottom, which I can then return to them. I've already experimented with it and it works. This way, not only can I grade things faster, but the kids get more feedback on which questions they got right or wrong. I hate spending time in class going over tests! I'm going to try this with one of my classes, and I'll do it with all of them if it works.
I like this email idea, because it's robust. More robust than the printers and floppies. The floppies suck, and are always breaking. The printer jams all the time. I've had assignments that were predicated on having everyone do something and print it, and the printer jams, and the kids are whining, and I spend the whole period trying to fix the printer, the the kids keep hitting Print, Print, Print, Print-so when you finally fix the printer, you sit watching Jenene's assignment print out 30 times, and the bell rings, and suddenly EVERY kid swears they did the assignment, but couldn't print it. Ugh!
This year in school, I've experimented with many different ways of doing things, which has been time consuming, but I've found some good ideas that hopefully will save me more time in the future. All I know is, I'm beat!
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