One new technology that I was really excited about using this year is @Schoology. The promise of this site to merge my website, online grade book (my district uses Infinite Campus), Moodle LMS, Google apps and social media was very appealing. I worked a little over the summer to familiarize myself with the layout and even imported question banks from Moodle to start building quizzes. I printed the access code on my syllabus and had my students sign up to be a part of my classes. Then my colleague and I tried to build our first quiz and discovered that the features I love most in Moodle would not translate in Schoology. My SCORM style questions and numerical questions don't work anymore and all my categories and subcategories that I used to randomize questions have to be recreated.
To add to my disappointment, we also learned that our students must also log in to our classes through a different pathway, called the "enterprise account," and that their first log in must be through a Windows machine on campus - never mind that our district is a Mac district and our computer lab has been converted into into an online learning classroom so we no longer have access to a Windows machine.
The one new technology I was most looking forward to has turned out to be a big flop, but I am still hopeful that we can work out the kinks and turn it into something really fabulous. Oh well, at least my calculators from the dollar store still work brilliantly! Does that count as technology?
To add to my disappointment, we also learned that our students must also log in to our classes through a different pathway, called the "enterprise account," and that their first log in must be through a Windows machine on campus - never mind that our district is a Mac district and our computer lab has been converted into into an online learning classroom so we no longer have access to a Windows machine.
The one new technology I was most looking forward to has turned out to be a big flop, but I am still hopeful that we can work out the kinks and turn it into something really fabulous. Oh well, at least my calculators from the dollar store still work brilliantly! Does that count as technology?