Teachers About What Works For Them In Who-Am-I?

Laurie Williams, United States
My kids' first homework assignment was to answer the 4 KIDLINK Response Questions. It's a great first "writing assessment": Do they answer questions in complete sentences? Do they write simple answers, or do they elaborate? How is their grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization? Is their handwriting legible?

Next, when there is a free moment, I train one student how to answer the Response Questions on the Web (our connection is in the classroom). Each student then trains the next student. We can send in 3 or 4 during the time others are working on seatwork. I *have* sent them in myself in previous years, but I like giving the kids the opportunity to "take charge". Once the first batch of Responses has gone in, I begin issuing Kidlink "business cards" to the students who have sent in their Responses. I use perforated business cards, and usually, I have them laminated so that they can hold up.

My kids do not have their own email account, they use my account. I use it for all my "school-related" mail, and not personal mail, so that the kids and parents can feel comfortable about them reading/sending email. My parents also use this address to contact me. Many of the students in my class have their own email accounts, but we do not access them from school. Obviously, I don't give out my account password...I log in first, and then the kids handle mail from there. Our school is currently using only one phone line/modem for the *entire* school....

Each of the 5 fifth grades has a one hour online block per day...mine is from 1:30-2:30. Any other available time is split between the library and other teachers (though only about 5 teachers activily use Internet, with me being the primary user ). Many of the teachers with assigned times will allow me to use their designated time.

Since we only have one computer in the room connected to the network, I have to arrange the structure of my lessons to allow small groups of 2-3 students, at most 4, at the terminal at one time. I'm usually able to get in 1/2 of my class doing research in a day, in small groups. On a busy day, or for a major assignment, 2 out of the 6 groups I have get to access the computer. Luckily, many of my kids have Internet access at home, and so we can discuss URL's to look up and search terms to use, and the kids do some Web research at home. They either 1. Print out the info they find, 2. Write down the URLs to use during their assigned computer time in class, or 3. Whack the pages and save the info to disk so that their groups can see the pages/print the pages from any of our computers offline.

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