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Sunday, October 4, 2009

Dealing with Distress re:paperless

Here is a recent post by a 8th grade

GLENN, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DRAG TABLES OR GRAPHS ONTO THE BLOG AND IT IS UNFAIR TO GRADE MY ESSAY WITHOUT SEEING THE WHOLE PROJECT. PLEASE GRADE THE P.O.W. ESSAY THAT I PRINT OUT AND BRING IN ON TUESDAY (I HAVE A SHADOW VISIT AT DREW ON MONDAY).

Firstly, this student is a little confused about how to use the blog environment. She is also distressed by the need to post it before the school week starts, even though she has had the week to get this assignment done. There is a part of me that suspects that her parents are involved in this email. This is one of my very best students and I have every faith in her ability to learn how to use the blogs to her advantage. This is what I wrote back to her on the blog:

Dear LLLLLLLLLLLL:

We can certainly talk about ways to imbed tables into your essay.

If you are using Word to write your essay, you can make a table inside the document and it should copy into your blog. Other people save their tables as PDF and upload them into their blogs that way. That is what IIIIIIIIII did this week, for example. If you are using Excel, you can go to the print and in the lower left corner is the save as pdf file function. If you are using Macintosh, you can take a picture of your table using Shift Command and the number 4, then include that into your blog. If you have a digital camera, you can take a picture and upload it into your blog.

1 comment:

montgorp said...

I have the same problem.

Kids panic about learning a new IT tool and want to go back to what they know.

And, yes, I think (well know, actually) parents get involved and become co-dependent in this dysfunction.

Sigh. We just have to persist.

I like your response to her.