Holy Toledo!

Ah, the stories I can tell. For right now, I'll write about one of the coolest pieces of technology I have ever seen. In school today, I helped my co-op cover a computer class during the day. In it, we had to administer a test and then have them log in to work on typing.

Well, administering a test really meant clicking a button and that's it. The computers all had the quiz pop up on their screens. All we did was sit as they took the quiz. The scores were immediately registered to us and we knew as soon as each student finished. If we were interested in where a student was on the test, all we had to do was click a button and we could see their screen. All from our own computer. We didn't have to get up at all.

Though we did not try all of the tools this program had to offer, we could even have taken over control of one of the student's computers to help them. This was all pretty amazing, at least to me. Definitely the tech highlight of my day.


*Note about the title - That was the phrase made popular by Oakland A's broadcaster Bill King, who died earlier this week. While I am not an A's fan, I am a baseball fan and found it interesting. Check out a write-up here

Back in Action

Sorry friends for ignoring my blog for so long. I've got a couple things to write about, but I'll only hit one now.

I had my first inservice day on Monday and it was interesting. Probably the most noteworthy part was trying to use a program on the internet with some of the other teachers. It was slow going at times, more than anything because they had so many teachers all going to the same site. While most tech people could have predicted this, it was not thought of by the presenter that day. In addition to this, some of the teachers struggled with using the internet and navigating the webpages. Also, many of the laptops were not fully charged, causing even more confusion.

Despite all of this, I learned a lot, both from a tech standpoint and an education standpoint. Since I should be focusing on tech, I will point out how important it will be for me to be able to use the internet easily (though proof of my blogging skills show this already). It seems like whatever I know will come into use as I will be able to teach my colleagues what to do. Pretty exciting.