Horrible Horrible Horrible

Maybe others can give me insight on this.  But exactly how am I supposed to use the chrome books if the chrome books don't actually work??

This week I spend a long time creating a quiz for my Geometry 1.5 students.  Using our new curriculum we are given a question bank to choose from.  The quiz made from the question bank is downloaded into Word.  No problem I thought.  I'll just copy and paste it into a google doc for my kids and they will be able to open it and take the quiz on the chrome books.

Wrong.

First, none of the equations enter into Google docs, which means that I got the privilege of going through and typing up every single problem as a new equation (terrible use of my time).  When class time came around half of the chrome books wouldn't connect to the internet.  The ones that did were so slow that not even google classroom would load.  I ended up having to print off the quiz and give half the class a paper copy anyways because their chrome books wouldn't load.  On top of all of that, grading is going to take about 5 times as long having to go into each students quiz.


I thought these were supposed to make our lives easier?  Even if I wanted to use the chrome books for a class discussion or cool interactive learning sites (because there are a bunch for geometry) I wouldn't be able to because the school cannot handle that many chrome books in use at once....Jenny Byrd and I were just discussing how some classroom materials have yet to arrive, but they are available for online use.  There is NO WAY I would try to get all my students online at the same time using these chrome books.  It would be a disaster.  Already I'm going to have to throw out the results from this test because it is just not fair to the students.

I think that chrome books are really awesome for some subjects.  I've seen Lutke use them brilliantly and Paul as well.  However, the use of chrome books in math just seems counter productive.  The students don't know what they are doing (or how to enter their answers) and a multiple choice test is just not realistic in a math setting.

If I'm missing something here someone please tell me, because at this moment I am ready to throw these out the window.

Let's get the ball rolling!

Super excited to be able to be the leader of the math department in becoming 1-1 and being a google educator.  There are still a lot of hesitations on my part concerning using all this wonderful technology in the classroom.  I've seen some awesome things in Tom Lutke's room and it makes me jealous that I don't get to teach a subject that is more welcoming to that kind of innovative thinking.  It seems that so many times we get stuck in our ways and it's so difficult to change around what we know and what we are used to.

I'm eager to learn and excited to try different methods using the Chrome books, but I'm also cautious because I don't want my classroom 'experiments' to negatively affect the students learning.  I feel as though it's going to be a fine line to walk until I can start to understand what works and what doesn't.