Ah, the joys of student email accounts:)

I set my students up with email accounts (and student IDs for passwords) about 2 months ago and am incredibly pleased with the results. Now, some may say that email is "no big thing". Those who believe such have probably not had many kids who were clueless about email accounts. Yes, you heard me right. I was close to experiencing shock myself over this considering the fact that I have several email accounts (like many of you).

Well, lots of support was needed here. No matter how many times they copied their accounts and passwords down, they would forget them. Fortunately, I made my email address (one designed for the class) the backup email address to recover user names and passwords. In a class of 13, I have had to enter my account for recovery issues at least 7 times. I am adding to a growing list of DO's and DON'T's for next year to make the process much more efficient.

I have found myself now sending out emails with all assignments and links in the emails. This has eliminated the need to retype the web addresses for half them. In fact, this past week I had them take a survival (lost in the wilderness) quiz as well as explore surviving natural disasters websites. Once they completed the online activities (quick quizzes and checklists), they had to compose (on Word for Mac) a survival journal based on their being lost in the woods. I wanted them to make me feel their pain and fear:) They then saved their documents and then emailed them to me. I will then save them as google docs so that we can revisit them later on next week.

It is a learning process, but with baby steps, they are making amazing headway. Their parents would be proud!

Denise