Thing 6

I have been having a good time working through the first 5 things and I like the idea of having my students using computers to handle photos. However, with that said, I am finding that something that could present a problem is the number of online accounts the kids would have to have to access the online tools. At this time the students at my school don't generally have a gmail account unless they have had computer class as an exploratory. Recently one of the Science teachers down the hall from me took all of her classes to the computer lab to sign them up to use Quizlet (http://quizlet.com/). This was presented to us by one of our techies at the start of the year as a good tool for our students. It was ok until she found out that the kids had to have an email address AND had to be 13 years old to sign up. About half of the kids in 7th grade are not yet 13 years old so this presented a problem. She found a creative way around it but it was an unexpected problem that made it necessary for her to take a 2nd day in the lab to finish getting all the kids signed up. The good news is that many of her kids are now using quizlet and that means that if I set up a study quide on that site that half of my students will already have access. I worry about what it would take to get kids signed up on flicker at school. I don't see that there is an age requirement but I'm pretty sure it requires an email address. Many of these online services require an email address and then a send a confirmation email. Most email services are blocked by our IT department so the kids cannot access the confirmation emails. Additionally, middle school students have a hard enough time just remembering the user id and password needed to login to the server when they turn the computers on. I can see it becoming everwhelming for some students to keep track of all the necessary login information. It would be helpful if I had a computer lab for a classroom everyday but I don't. It would be great if I could have even 2 or 3 student computers in my classroom, because then some of these things could be done at the same time as my non-techie teaching, but again - no student computers in my room. :(
I love the idea of technology but I feel very limited in what I can do in my teaching just because of the limited resources in my building. I think that something I might do when I get back to school is give my students a technology survey or inventory to find out who has what at home.
So. . . I'm trying to keep an open mind through my 23 things journey. I think that at this point technology in my teaching is more available to me than it is to my students. I hope that in the next few years that changes.
Those are my thoughts for thing 6. Thanks for reading. :)