Casualty

This week we had our first Chromebook casualty. The screen is cracked and the LCD looks like it is bleeding. Very sad. It turns out we might have a warranty after all, so it might be replaced. I don't know how it happened, but the rules have been tightened up. No bags on the tables at any time, even if they aren't touching a laptop. The damage looks like it is from pressure, so I'm not taking any chances. In terms of what students have been doing: they used advanced search to look for and compare/contrast powerpoints on Napoleon. I had tried this with the French Revolution, but it didn't work very well. I think this was because the French Revolution is such a big event so there was too much out there. I though the Napoleon assignment went really well with students being successful. The level of work output is increasing as students become more used to working on them.

We did take a day off the laptops to do a simulation and students just seemed confused without the laptops. I intended to go right back to them the next day, but we had a big power issue and were lacking WiFi. I just decided to ditch them for the day and I had a mixed reaction. Some were thankful to be on paper and others were not as engaged and verbally expressed their dissatisfaction. I had a suggestion from Twitter that I install offline apps for those kinds of days, so I will be looking into that.

Today was a difficult day because of Google's birthday game. All the kids wanted to play the game and unfortunately even after a warning they were still doing it and the computer was taken away. I told them if they finished the assignment we could talk about playing it, but they were not deterred.