Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Classroom Management Challenges

The biggest challenge I have had with our 1:1 rollout is students’ technology issues.  My 7th grade students have Netbooks that are on their 3rd year and they are beaten up.  Our tech people are amazing and are constantly working on individual problems. We are fortunate to have a lot of loaners, but we still have issues with accessing the network, losing documents and other technological difficulties.  I am very big on modeling and teaching procedures at the beginning of the year.  I take a lot of time instructing students and allowing them to figure out how they will be using their devices in my class.  But no matter how much frontloading I do, there are always a handful of students that can’t get to where they need to be or find what they need to turn in.  With classes of 30+ and only 44 minutes to teach science per class, I don’t have a lot of time to troubleshoot.  I do have student techies in each class, but if they are helping a student that takes away from their instructional time.  Honestly I think it is something that I will just have to work with because it’s like the olden days when kids didn’t bring their supplies, a good teacher just has to have contingency plans.  Often I have them work with a partner or print out a pdf if they can’t bring it up on their computer.  I don’t want to lose instructional time so for now it’s what works.  

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