This will be a very short post because it's the middle of finals week and I have a boatload of grading.
Right now I am annoyed with technology and my own inability to have it work smoothly. Yesterday I found myself annoyed with Blackboard because of its complexity and mysteriousness.
First of all, unlike my old handwritten grade collector or even Micrograde, Blackboard's many functionalities (which, I agree, are special and make life better for those who like a lot of choices) require me to select or write five different times for every column in its Gradebook. Sometimes I forget a click. My second issue with the Gradebook is that sometimes Blackboard doesn't "feel" the number I type in and if I'm not looking right at the screen (for example, when I am recording a list of scores written down on a paper in front of me) I won't notice my error until a student calls it to my attention. These two BB Gradebook issues occured yesterday in a single class. While I encourage students to keep track of their grades and police my input skills, I still have the occasional pang of embarrassment if I have to be questioned more than once about a single score.
And finally, a special BB issue that came up for me yesterday is that Turnitin Grademark was acting differently in my school desktop Windows mode than it does on my AppleOS home laptop. I was not able to select anything on a student paper. Why why why would it act that way? I'd already told my online students that I'd have their papers finished by the end of the day. But rather than going through the effort of either solving the mystery myself by Googling for "windows, Blackboard 9.1, issue, Grademark Turnitin" or contacting the helpdesk, I just decided I'd finish up today, Wednesday, instead. So I BB spammed out a note of apology. Then I literally "threw up my hands" and stalked away from my desk to the coffee cart and got a snack.
So yesterday combined two of the primary reasons I'm so so so so ready to retire: grading and wonders of always improving technology.
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