GradeQuickSlow - A Sample of True In-School Correspondence, Offered without Commentary or Footnotes for non-Pedagogues

Dear Principal,

I know you always like to hear commentary, so here’s mine while I’m entering grades: GradeQuick seems to me to be Stone Age tech. I know we’ve got lots of technological (and other) needs, and I may be the only one who feels this way, but whenever I use it I feel stymied by a myriad of niggling inconveniences over and over again. If the question of “should we renew?” or “what do people think?” comes up, my answers are “no,” and “arrrgh.”

One quick illustration: even with GradeBook to GradeBook Copy (which is strangely inactive this year - finally sent our tech guy an inquiry today), there is no way to make commonsense changes (such adding tests, grade markings, or grade footnotes) just once. Always you have to make it to one of the four gradebooks, and then copy it.

I was driven off the deep end tonight by the effort to delete the Mean from my reports. I found an old e-mail that answered that question, but other programs (not grading programs – I have, alas, no alternate experience other than my wonderful old Excel spreadsheets: beautifully flexible, endlessly adventurous (i.e., always open to catastropic, unnoticed changes)), seem so much more intuitive and easy to grasp, unlike this sentence. Perhaps I just have more regular and long-lasting experience with them, but after two years and a bit, I still don’t like GradeQuick.

Thanks for listening to the vent,

J.

Attention Microsoft Programmers, or Influential Competitors

I would like to create a document, stored on my hard drive, containing links to other documents stored on my hard drive. I don’t want to upload those other linked documents to an internet document file, because I don’t always want to have to hook up online to get access to those documents. I simply want to be able to turn on my computer, open one file, see an internal hyperlink (perhaps colored green instead of blue), click on the link, and have the second document open after having been accessed from its location on my hard drive. Is that possible to do now? If not, is it possible to make it happen? It would make my life as a teacher easier: I could create a syllabus with links to all the relevant documents, or perhaps with links to the relevant folders containing the relevant documents. For instance, if I have “Syllabus” saved on the desktop, I want to open it and click on the internal hyperlink “Elizabethan Literature,” which would then open my Elizabethan lit. file. Or, if I have “Hamlet reading schedule” listed, I would like to click on it and suddenly have the Word file “Hamlet reading schedule” pop up. It would be even better, of course, if, once the original document was published online, it could automatically make the linked docs accessible online, via actual hyperlinks, whenever one’s computer was online, but perhaps that would be too great a hassle – certainly the accessibility of such docs would be highly variable.

So, please, People Who Know More About Computers Than I, if such a capability already exists, please let me know. Consider this a bleg. And please, Microsoft Programmers Or Their Influential Competitors, if such a thing does not exist, please make it do so, quickly, so everyone else has to make it do so too, and then I’ll get it in my next computer when I buy it in a few years – but remember, you’ll have to let me know that it’s been put in, so don’t forget. Thank’ee much.

Sincerely,

J.

An Annoyance

Why is Blogger's block quote function so useless? The much-maligned Microsoft Word somehow manages to figure out that a block quote means a new left margin now exists, with words on the right wrapping into place along the new margin and not carrying with them their enter commands on the right-hand side. In visual terms, what this means is that I have to manually re-configure each block paragraph I create, so that instead of this:

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I get this:

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Which obviously makes more sense.

If Blogger has in fact fixed this problem with some work-around, I make no mea-culpas for not doing my research, as their block quote button has not incorporated it, and a block quote button that doesn’t block quote seems fairly useless to me.

If the fault lies with html code, and not Blogger, then I guess I’m sorry. But if somebody’s invented the i-Phone, not to mention this tablet I’m using, couldn’t someone figure this out, considering just how many are blogging today?

Update: This is not to mention that in the “Compose” window of the Create Post function, a space between the main text and the first line of a block quote is meaningless until it is actually placed manually in the “Edit Html” window. Why? And the same space below the block quote is always smaller than the space above it. Why? None of this seems rational, though no doubt code writers – and I am ignorant of their craft – know the reasons.

Update: Of course, now that I’ve pasted this into Blogger (which can’t do curly quotes or apostrophes, so I compose in Word), I’ve got to reformat the block quotes again. Sigh. I know, it’s the least of my worries, and the system’s free. Shut up and blog.

I Need a Synchronizer

The proliferation of information is a botheration to me. I have now four or five computers with multiple copies of the same information on them. I don’t want to lose any of the information, in case it is ever valuable again (much of it is – pictures, music files, tests and questions for my classes), so I copy it and copy it and copy it, over and over again. So now I have multiple copies of each document, sometimes multiple copies on one computer. And when I try to copy over the old stuff, I first am scared to because of what I might lose – I have not composed exclusively on only one or the other ever. And I am second scared because when I try to erase them I am sometimes told that I cannot erase this or that “system file,” that some system file called “thumbs,” an unprepossessing name if ever there was one, might bring down all of Windows. I need a synchronizer, a program that will tell me about these various files, destroying the older identical copies and telling me the amount of variation betweten the mostly identical copies, maybe combining them into one document with the newer text, wherever it is, tacked on or interpolated into the old, pictured in red, or underlined, or preserved in speechclouds that can be called up at the asterisks that identify them, the old text shaded or parentheseed or italicized. There’s gotta be some way of organizing reams of virtual text without being swallowed up in the cataclysm of copies I’ve created.

SmartBoard, Smart-ass Students

Among the lines that I have heard from kids while I've been using the SmartBoard recently:

"Well, at least we know the school is putting the tuition money to good use!"

"Good thing we have the SmartBoard, since you can't use the white board for that!" (Said when I write on the SmartBoard with styluses (styli?) that look like colored markers.)

"Good thing we have the SmartBoard, since you can't use the projector for that!" (Said when I type notes into the computer from my desk and have them appear on the SmartBoard.)

All this means, of course, is that I have to come up with better ways to use the SmartBoard - but I already love that I get to save my daily notes and so have something to look back at when I try to remember what the hell I was talking about. I don't have to spend the extra time recording my recollections of class after the fact. (No, I don't plan very well - that's for another post.)

Smart Board, Stupid Students

Just got a SmartBoard today (I'm sure there's supposed to be a little TM after that - as convinced as I am that it's one word), and don't really know how to use it, but I'm enjoying the process of learning. I'm a first-year teacher at this school (sixth-year overall), which raises the question how I earned this privilege. I didn't do it by buttering anyone up, or by conniving and telling lies. I think the process had three steps:

1. Mention the SmartBoard in your interview as a way of looking up on the latest classroom technology.
(a). Do so when making mention is relevant, i.e., when they ask you how you would like to incorporate technology into the classroom
(b). Do so honestly - if it is the case, say you have never used one, but would love the opportunity, because you could imagine the number of uses to which it could be put.

2. During the first few days of in-services preceding the beginning of classes, pester the science teacher who's been strong-armed into being the tech coordinator (you know he's actually happy to have been strong-armed into this position, don't you?) to let you practice with the SmartBoard after hours, even though it's sitting hooked up in the library, not in your room.

3. Never ask for the SmartBoard to be put in your room, but never say you don't want it when they offer it. Do suggest that, as a first-year, perhaps others should have the opportunity to get the first SmartBoard in the school in their rooms - but don't be insistent.

4. Schedule time in the library to use the SmartBoard, even if you only do it once because, not knowing how to use it particularly well yet, you find it not to be all that useful.

5. The day you show up for school planning on using the regular board, only to find an uncalibrated SmartBoard sitting on top of it, don't complain. Start messing around with it, learn how to calibrate it on your own (it's not too hard - if you can't figure it out, just type your notes into the notebook page), and start earning a reputation as the most tech-savvy teacher in the school.

6. Plan to bring a gun, or many detention sheets, to convince students not to press the SmartBoard at the beginning of class when you're trying to use the computer at your desk but your projector is still on. Also useful for convincing students during study not to stand up, while you're looking at the SmartBoard, and place their hands in front of the projector.

That's six steps, for those of you who don't teach math. Also, step 6 supplied me with my post's title.

Computers our Saviors

I can't wait until the time when all my student work comes to me via computer, and the moment it's graded is the moment it's entered into the gradebook and returned to the student. As an English teacher, however, I'm going to require the ability to write easily on a screen, for there is nothing at all smooth or naturalistic about the few editing systems I have tried. This observation is occasioned by my effort right now to enter a few hundred papers into the grade book, in a completely haphazard and disorganized manner. The "Final Grade" column looks like the scene of a massacre right now, with victims either dead or holding their bowels in. It'll clean up eventually, though, as I get through the sadly disordered pile. The good students' work will be in there, and will be recorded accordingly, and the poor students' work will be generally missing, with a few exceptions, and grades will come out to be what we thought they'd be all along, with, again, a few exceptions.

Of course, when it comes, if it comes, this technology will not save me. A long-ago graphic from Time Magazine survives in my brain, of a soldier laden with modern weaponry. Bullets and guns are certainly more powerful and apparently much lighter than the old wood and iron monsters of ages past, but this has not decreased the soldier's load, for now that each newer and lighter bullet does the work of however many heavier and older projectiles, his superiors simply multiply the number of bullets (and other improved items) he is expected to carry, bringing him just up to the point of collapsing under the weight, where all his predecessors marched before him. In the same way, the faster I am able to dispose of my duties, whatever they may be, the faster the expectations will be loaded on my back, and on I will trudge as before.