technology at school

The collège has a pretty nifty computer lab. There are about 18 stations that are connected to the school network and the Internet, and a teacher post that allows me to click on an post and not only see what the student is working on, but speak to him individually through his headphones. I want this at home - it's so nice to be able to solve problems from the teacher's station.

There is an English Evaluation that all 6th graders in the Académie are supposed to take to evaluate what they know when they arrive at the school. We've been working on ours for, well, too long now. (Oh, I just realized Chantal might read this....we're nearly finished, Madame Inspector....) First, we had to wait until after the kids had taken their required evaluations in Math and French, and then we had to work it in our schedules. It takes several days for the students to complete the 3 sections: listening, oral expression, and writing. My students have been finished with 2 of the 3 for several weeks, and we've been waiting to do the oral expression once the other teacher and I can agree on how to administer it. The problem is, all the students have to be interrogated separately, which can take far too long. Then I had an ah-ha moment. Annick had asked me to record the questions so they would hear a native speaker. I went far beyond that and put the whole oral expression part on the computer. With the help of Suzanne in the computer lab, I made a slide show with the colors they had to identify, I recorded the questions they had to answer, and created slides of words they had to read. The coolest part is that each student opens the file on the network and records his answers in a file that I can listen to later. It took me hours to do it, and then this morning Suzanne and I found a few bugs while evaluating the first group, but I think we've got it all worked out.

I was so excited about discovering the secrets of the network that after spending 5 hours on the computer at school on Friday afternoon (my afternoon off, by the way), I came home and spent more hours surfing the internet and designing Halloween activities for all of my levels. It's something like a webquest I would have published on my website at home. I don't have my own site here, but the network is great for activities at school, and I can ask Suzanne to publish some on the school website. After my hours and hours of work, I was worried that the images, spooky sounds and recording of my voice pronouncing the vocab words wouldn't transfer from my MacBook to those at school, but in the end my only problem was the font; a problem easily resolved.

I have reserved the lab for the end of the week - I thought it would be a good activity to do the last class before vacation - and have my fingers crossed that the activities I designed are appropriate and interesting to these mysterious French adolescents. If all goes well, I'll begin work on my Thanksgiving lesson very soon.