It was kind of difficult to keep the students engaged today. Some students whirled through their busy work, having found and completed all their work. They were supposed to read silently as the rest of the class finished their work. What ended up happening was a lot of side chatter that distracted the students actually reading.
The structure of the first assignment was that students had to look for work whether it was done electronically (submitted on Schoology) or in hard copy. It was a little difficult because not all assignments were done electronically, or vice versa. As a result, there was a lot of confusion as to whether or not students had all their assignments. Ms. Baldwin came up with a solution that, if students had done the work in hard copy, they could take a picture of it on their Ipads and submit to Schoology. Schoology, then, kept the running tab of all missing assignments.
The engagement level was down. On top of that, this Wednesday served as the last day of the week for the students. They were all discussing their long weekend plans and found lots of topics to converse about.
Ms. Baldwin and I had to do a lot of monitoring to make sure students were staying on task today. It was hard to keep the focus level where it needed to be, and I wonder what other things we could have had the students do other than just silent reading in that forum. Obviously, the latter-- as much as the students typically enjoy it-- was not working today.
The electronic vs. paper work dilemma is an important one to consider. If we want students to be consistently documenting their learning (which we do), we need to develop systems to help them save things as they happen as opposed to after the fact. I like to idea of taking pictures of paper work because it's so easy to do-- imagine how easy today would have been if students had been doing that all along...just something to think about.
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