Diigo educator

I am now the proud owner of a diigo educator account, with a console to create class groups.

I have no idea if this is a good thing or not. It seems like it is something that can help with managing stuff and might be something to put into the blog as that will be needed next year. Something to ask around about the effectiveness of.

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Chromium

Having booted u the computer to get some work done, only to find out it won’t be accessible for a while, I had a play with some parallels things. Parallels seems to work very well on this machine. Windows takes a while to boot up and sometimes seems to freeze for a bit, but this is all tolerable.

The parallels start came with a link to install Google chrome OS, so I have put that on. It all installed very quickly and started up easily. After logging on with the school account I get straight to mail and documents and these all display perfectly – though finding the f11 button to toggle full screen view made me scratch my head – expose was using it, so that needed to be changed.

I wonder if it is possible to last a day on chrome. I should give it a try at work. Some things I wonder about:

• accessing itunes and podcasts
• accessing the school server

sound didn’t work with some stuff – all things to look into.

An update: This has crashed a couple of times so far – as in all the browser windows shut and it offered to restore. It does restore very quickly (as in less than 5 seconds)

Backchannel

I tried a couple of things for back channel use in class. Some groups are doing review and I thought it might be useful for students to be able to post queries and help each other work out answers to problems. I tried using todaysmeet first. This didn’t work as the thread would get very untidy very rapidly. If someone asked a question, the answer would not be associated with it. It also took too much policing as it wasn’t clearly useful.

I thought wallwisher might help with the issue of associating questions with answers. Turns out it functioned so slowly with the group we simply abandoned this one.

Basically, I think this is an idea that doesn’t fit my classroom very well – I would rather have people just talk to each other. The idea that the conversation could carry on beyond the room would only work if it involved something like facebook pages.

e-marking

It’s emarking season again. I guess I am looking forward to getting it done – sometimes the interaction with colleagues is quite rewarding, though mostly it is just hours.

I have offered to do a short show and tell of the system for teachers, with two purposes in mind:

1-letting teachers know what happens to student work so that they can advise their students

2-letting teachers know what is involved with emarking incase they are interested

Here I will collate what I should describe

As teachers

• Papers come without names or any other ID
• Legibility is exellent as long as they use the right writing implement – zoom really helps
• Tick means a mark – the mark scheme is everything
• Automatically taken to a marking section and will not necessarily see anything not ‘in’ the box – though all the paper is visible in display mode
• Are your intentions clear? when you cross something out we will still give you credit if it is relevant
• For option questions – we are required to mark any submission and credit will be given for the best, regardless of what you write on the front – don’t recommend answering all
• Papers have penalty marks – sd and u

As markers

• Ergonomics matter – riser, lighting  and mouse
• Mac setup – do the tests early
• Get your options right – follow the guide and do the practices
• early contact with team
• Direct mail people at the IBO – they really don’t mind
• make sure you assoicate the right annotation with the right question part – this is much easier in this iteration
• Have a calculator to hand