“This will be really cool when it works.”

Ask me about Schoolnet the first semester of the 2013-2014 school year and I would have said it was consistently inconsistent, so much so that when presenting, even our mentors advised us to prepare for Schoolnet not to work with screenshots and screencasts.

Initially, teachers were excited about the new site, but with the inconsistencies soon became frustrated. Each school sent two teachers to learn some of the basics of Schoolnet and prepare to take this training back to their schools. The school district set aside several hours for teachers to learn the system and nobody could get into the system. It was a frustratingly complete waste of time, and an embarrassment for the teacher leaders trying to share the system. Needless to say, Schoolnet did not win any fans that day and may have even lost a few.

We need this to work.  We have teachers being held accountable for standards for which they don’t have resources to teach.  DPI and the State School Board hoped that Home Base would fill that void.  But it’s March, and we are just recently getting to the point where teachers can get into Schoolnet consisitently.  This year has been so disappointing in that regard.

When trying to share the features in Schoolnet with teachers, I grew so tired of hearing myself say, “This will be really cool when it works.”

Then in late early February, things were improved and it started working consistently. So a few brave teachers opened their classrooms to me to try out a few things in Schoolnet. And it really was pretty cool. So I’m tentatively hopeful that this system our State is hanging its hat on might actually be a benefit to teachers. Maybe Schoolnet will start living up to the promises as advertised.

The video below is a 6th grade social studies class, in which the students are studying the Barbarian Invasions preceding the Middle Ages in Europe. They had spent three days reading about innovations that the invaders brought to Europe and creating an infomercial for the innovation. Once the infomercials were completed, we had each group submit their videos to Schoolnet for grading.

Home Base Student Portal from Joni Allison on Vimeo.

photo credit: Sybren A. Stüvel via photopin cc