And so it continues...

Yesterday the website was up and running and I was ready to jump in with both feet. I worked with the platform for my first class and was feeling OK about the work that we were doing. These students had spent a day on the site - then were having to do work off the site for two days and then went back onto the site. It was hard trying to get seventh grade students to try and get them back into their work on the site. They reluctantly signed back in and got to work. 

I found that they were struggling with the independence of the project. It felt too frustrating that there was too much work to do. Students wanted to jump in and submit their work without reading directions and were having a hard time navigating the site - trying to figure out the scope and sequence of the work they were to be doing. On my end it felt very frustrating to see my students struggling. In my day to day class when I see this I am able to quickly jump in using this formative assessment to change the direction - modify the google doc they are working on or change the task completely. Using badges4edu I felt like I could not put my hands in what the students were working on. Instead of planning based on what my students were doing and what they needed - I felt like I had to plan out for three weeks with all the performance tasks completed and finalized at the beginning of a unit and was worried about changing anything. I also felt like I was spending most of my time at a computer instead of spending my time with my students. 

After my first class I was able to do a google hangout with Susan and Audrey which was tremendously helpful. I renamed some of the steps and made the work more sequential. I took away the quest and badge buttons and rolled out to my second class and it went GREAT! Students were plugging away. At the end of the class students were asking if they could continue working on their badges. They were psyched about the points and seemed to really take to the idea of the site. 

I was finally feeling great about all of this hard work that my students were putting into the site and I was feeling like the hours of planning that I had put in was worth it. 

Then 3:30 rolled around and I was going to start looking at submissions from students to look at the work that they had done over the day. This is what I saw:

So here I am back at where I was last week. I have taken all of the quests and turned them into Google documents and created buttons on the website for the students to work through. 

It is not so exciting or as sleek at the badges4edu - but it works and it feels secure in the work that we are doing that students will be able to access their work and know how to do it. We will keep you posted on what happens next!

If I could FIRE a FIREwall

Ok so here is the story. Yesterday was roll out day! YAY! After major issues with Credly and coming up with creative work arounds everything was set and ready to go and I was ready for a great day.

Students in our first class got in, signed up, with the typical seventh grade - "wait what?" or "what is my user name again?" Students started working, they were feeling like it was a lot of work and a little frustrating at times for them, but it was all working and we were taking their feedback as useful information to use in future planning.

Then came the 10:30 class. Full of happy smiling faces fresh from recess where they were enjoying sunshine and fresh air. I told students to go to the website and this is what we were met with.

Being the quick thinking tech integrated teacher that I am I told students "Do not worry class...everything will be fine..." while in my head I was saying a bunch of words that if used in the classroom would create a lot of trouble for me. So I jumped to firefox! What a great idea I thought...

Ok this is when I started to get frustrated. I could not even log in on my end and I had ALL of my work stored in the website. I could not even pull the work that students could do - so we watched a movie about the Civil War and said we would try again tomorrow. 

Today is tomorrow and I can still not access the site in the building. I am able to access it out of the building and at home I was able to pull the quests and turn them into google docs and have students work on their choice of three quests today in class - but it is so not the experience that I was hoping for my students to have. 

This is clearly an issue with the firewall at school - however I am not having much support in getting this fixed so here I am sitting and waiting - hoping that this "issue fixes itself." Bill Slocum. 

Here goes to deeps breaths and smiles through the challenges!