LY #132 Technirritation

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. 

LY #54 Tech whines, Spelling whines

So I took off and didn't visit my online classes for over 24 hours!

This is because I don't like the tablet interface.  I took my Google Nexus with me to Portland but the Blackboard interface is cumbersome and tiring.  I bought a year's worth for $1.99 but don't think I'll use it again for schoolwork.  I was not able to post an announcement to my classes because I couldn't figure out how to do it.  When I hit the "announcements" button it showed me the announcements from the BB administrator herself rather than showing me the announcements for a particular class.

Anyway, the class did not fall apart in my "absence."  When I got home this afternoon I responded to the most recent "primary" posts.  Each week, students are required to post one thoughtful text-responsive observation of communication behaviors.  They also need to respond to one other student's primary post as well as having a five turn conversation with that student or anyone else.  It makes for a lot of reading for me but I find that the conversational requirement actually gets the students interacting with each other more.

I wish, however, that they would spell-check.  Blackboard doesn't seem to do that automatically anymore -- one needs to hit the spell button to get the appropriate red underlining.  Sadly, this leads students to allow many uncorrected spelling errors.   I don't grade on either spelling or grammar but that doesn't mean I don't see it.  When people mix up there, their, and they're or two, to, and too, their action annoys me.  Then there are the folks who just type crazy!  Ack!

Now, the poor spelling and grammar doesn't indicate poor thinking.  Sometimes the posts with the terrible spelling are thoughtful and contain detailed observations of the world.  And sometimes good writers can make the dumbest statements.  Here is one of the ideas that bugged me last week. They read the chapter on nonverbal communications.  In their postings, some of my students wrote about certain situations having "a lot of nonverbal communication."  As though there are situations in which people are gathered together that do not have "a lot of nonverbal communication."  Nonverbal communication is everywhere all the time if people can see, taste, touch, smell, or hear each other.  What do these folks not get about the idea that all behavior communicates?  It's not just select behaviors that have messages.  ALL BEHAVIORS!!!  ALL!!!

Whew.  I'm glad I got that off my chest.

(See the nonverbal within the verbal there?) 

LY #32: Online Teaching: The Annoying Bits (of Blackboard)

Some of online teaching is fun.  I like making little videos with Camtasia (as you can tell).  And I'll be sad when I can no longer take the software off on my taxes :-(

But I don't like keeping track of every single button that has to be pressed exactly the same in every section.  Right now I'm teaching three sections of Interpersonal Communication.  I learned, the first time I taught more than one online class, to make the sections different colors as a way of keeping myself from getting lost.  I even name the classes by their colors:  Red Class, Green Class, Blue Class.  Here you see them open in three fresh pages, though usually I just tab them.

I try to just "copy" everything it's possible to copy from one class to another.  But the settings sometimes have to be fixed in the particular sections they inhabit.  And there are so many settings!  Date to open a site, date to close a site, date that the work is due, how many points, etc etc etc.

And the goldern interface has changed every time I've gone on vacation!  Sometimes the changes are helpful, sometimes they just seem annoying, at least until I get used to them.  For example, changes last year in the discussion boards were a bit irritating at first.  I can no longer click a button that allowed me to read every unread post in a forum.  I now have to "collect" ever item in selected threads or click into each thread and then make sure to mark any unanswered posts as "read."  It's just a few more steps and it does keep the grading more orderly, but it's not as efficient.

And sometimes, just changing the look of something is sort of disruptive to a change-averse old brain like mine own.

On the other hand, I get to do all this work in my pajamas with a cat on my lap and a very fluffy poodle-girl lying next to the chair.