As Time Goes By: Thing 21

Oh the joy of a calendar--another place you can mark off events as you accomplish them and then realize your life is passing you by as you do. I suppose it is a bittersweet thing . . .

While I was working on the calendar I realized how cool this would actually be for kids on that first day of each 6 weeks. If everyone had a Google account (and by now my GT kids do), and if everyone had access to a computer (which they should any day now), we could fill this sucker out together with all the important dates for assignments, etc. And then, the excuse of "I didn't know it was due" dies a horrid, bloody death. Sigh.

But maybe because people are trying to enter grades, or maybe because it is just early in the day, or maybe just because the school servers are old and over used, the calendar program was really slow. At one point, it just locked up completely. But that's okay; I had time. Now on the first day of the 6 weeks, I might not have time or patience to go through that. But I think it would be cool. I'm all for anything that throws responsibility back on the students. Of course, I would need to know when all my stuff was going to be due and what we were doing, but I'm getting better at that as the years go by.

The other thing I decided to explore was Google Books because I wasn't sure what it was exactly. The first thing I did was type in Lord of the Flies. Why? Because this book is still under copyright, I assume, because none of the book companies we are adopting from have it as a title to adopt. And yet there it was on Google Books--full text. Now it did say limited time or something, but then as I kept looking, lo and behold! They had all kinds of versions of LotF, including one that was a casebook. My first thought was "research". I only have one edition of LotF, but some of the other editions have introductions by Bloom or other scholars, and now kids could actually see these copies and learn information that might be pertinent to their research paper. So I went back to see if they had Arden editions for Shakespeare. These are expensive, but have excellent introductions--and they were there. I think I will be using this feature for my students when it comes to research. I can't expect them to buy the Arden Shakespeare, but they have access to the information through this Google feature.

Let me just go post that to my calendar. . .