E-mail is so Old School

And Landlines Too

A common theme in this blog is communication. It is key to so many elements of my job as a DL (distributed learning) teacher.

E-mail

Lately I'm finding it is harder to get in touch with my students. E-mail is so oldschool for them. Students may have their own e-mail address, but often only check it once a week. I wonder if most high schoolers rely on messaging in Facebook as opposed to e-mail? That seems to be the way many of my friends 'e-mail' these days.

Landline

Phoning isn't the old standby it used to be either. It seems that for a lot of families the landline is the number they give the school, but in reality they don't use it much as each member of the family has their own cell. Once you track down the right person's cell number you might be ok. The students, though, they aren't so keen on voice calls. Instead they're all about texting.

These changes have really only come about in a big way in the past year.

Texting

So when my colleague suggested that we needed district issued cell phones for texting our students, I laughed at first and then realized that she was probably onto something! I don't use my person cell that much (and only learned how to text a few months ago--yes I'm a cell phone ludite) so I have a very limited plan. And I'm not keen on giving out my personal number to my students. Come to think of it, they're probably not that keen on giving out their cell number to their teacher!

Question Time

Do you text your students? If so, how have you set this up so that proper boundaries are set, both for them and for you? If you have students at a distance, how else do you keep in contact?

As always, thanks for reading what I write.

Photo Credits
All images in this post are have Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Licenses.

e-mail screenshot by mwoodard
Tyneham - old telephone by Whipper snapper
Stop texting & watch the game by Lorainne DeSabato

May I Have A Word?

This past little while I've been exploring ways to improve communication with my students. I teach at

Photo by ohhector
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

a distributed learning school (DL) and have limited face-to-face contact with my students. My students are in grades 8 to 11 and I am responsible for math and science. At this point, these courses are paper based. Their other core courses, English and Social Studies, are delivered in WebCT.

A challenge has been setting up an effective way to communicate directly with all of the students. Many of the 8s and 9s do not have an e-mail that they use, so e-mail communication is mainly through a family or parent account. We do have a school website where Google Calendars for each of the grades are posted. This has worked well in terms of posting time-lines and important dates, but not much else.  Add to the mix the fact that I have very few so called digital natives in the group, and perhaps you can understand my difficulties. (Teaching 21st century literacy skills to this group will be a whole other post...)

Wikis?

I have only dabbled in using wikis, so this past Professional Development (PD) day I set up test wikis in Wetpaint and Wikispaces. After tinkering around for a bit, I felt that I was just duplicating what I already have on the school website, so I don't think that the wiki is necessarily the way to go to improve communication with my students.

Moodle?

I've used Moodle a little bit; as a participant in a few KnowWeeks courses, and I was part of an Open School BC pilot project delivering Science 10 through Moodle. My district is hosting Moodle in house (as part of the one to one tablet laptop program, I believe), but to access Moodle students have to get onto the district server using Citrix and then log onto Moodle. Citrix can be a little slow and has a nasty habit of kicking you off. I looked into a Moodle hosting service and they seem to fall into two groups--the "it's too good to be true" $5 per month options and the "wow, that's a lot of clams for a small school" $5000+ per year options.

WebCT Students' Lounge

Photo by imedagoze
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

An idea that my colleague suggested is setting up a "Students' Lounge" in WebCT, in which all students would be registered. Announcements and batch e-mails could be easily handled here. In addition, almost all students should already be signing into WebCT every day. I have to find out if there would be any costs to setting up this 'course' and enrolling all our students.

Where It's At

Right now, barring cost, the best option would appear to be setting up a Students' Lounge in WebCT. I'll also investigate to see if the district could be convinced to make Moodle available out of house (is that the opposite of in house?)

How Do You Do It?

If you don't see your students face to face on a regular basis, how do you ensure that communication is effective and efficient? Are there other tools out there that I should be investigating?  As always, thanks for taking the time to read this!

How Do You Get Your Google Glow On?

My colleague, Jodie, and I got an e-mail the other day from the organizers of the Virtual School Society's Annual Spring Conference saying that they did have room for us after all to give our presentation Get Your Google Glow On and could we still do it? Even though the conference is next week (not a lot of prep time), Jodie and I are good sports and said yes.


Image: google_logo by keso

Nervous About the Presentation
Yes, I've been teaching for awhile now, but for some reason I'm more comfortable talking to an auditorium of high school kids than I am speaking to a group of my peers. Added to that, the last time I did a presentation at a conference was when I was wrapping up my MSc in Biology about 13 years ago; hopefully distance learning educators are less ruthless than grad students and post-docs who are trying to make a name for themselves!

Collaboration & Communication
Jodie and I are presenting on some of the many on-line tools that Google offers. We're highlighting Google Notebook, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. The presentation is aimed at beginners who have not used these tools before. We're planning on focusing on how these tools can allow for increased collaboration and better communication.

How We Use The Tools
Since September we've been using Google Calendar to post relevant due dates, exam dates etc. We created a separate calendar for each grade and students can subscribe to their calendar or just view them on our website (see the grade 9 calendar here). I teach at a distributed learning school where many of our students are working asynchronously. The calendar 'deadlines' have been very helpful to let students know if they are on track to finishing their courses on time.

Jodie and I use Notebook to book mark sites we want to show the students in a particular unit. We've just been working on a series of lessons on hatching duck eggs; Jodie set up a notebook and shared it with me so that I could add links as well. I also use Notebook to organize the links for my Elluminate Live! sessions.

As for Google Docs, I've been preparing my Elluminate Live! lesson presentations using the Presentation tool. To demonstrate how to solve Applications of Math 10 questions I set up a spreadsheet in Google Docs and walked a student through the process on-line. We're also starting to get students to collaborate with each other using the Documents software.

How Do You Use These Google Tools?
Do you use any of these three Google tools with students or colleagues? If so, would you be willing to share how they have been effective for you? If so I'd love to hear from you!

Post Script
I'm posting this using the Blog Posting option in Flock. I'm curious as to how this will work out as I'm new to using Flock.

Added after posting--The Flock upload worked fairly well, except that none of my font formats were uploaded (italics and bold).

Blogged with the Flock Browser



Tags: Google, Google Docs, Google Notebook, Google Calendar, VSS conference, collaboration, communication, tools