Friday, March 20, 2020

Teaching From Home–Day 5

As one of my co-workers put it it's been a long year this week. I might ease up on that easier say a long month this week. It sure has been a learning experience.

Today’s big learning was that setting up a virtual machine for students you have to be careful about not just setting up the apps but file permissions and extra folders. I’m still not sure what happened with one of the apps we use. It’s a home grown app that was written by one of the other CS teachers. I don’t have the source for it so right now I am thinking there is some little thing I don’t know about it that is causing me problems. These things are always harder to solve when you are doing so much asynchronously and are not in the same location.

We’re going to move on from that unit early anyway because we are having fewer class meetings and something has to give.

My freshmen will be starting programming next week. Visual Studio on this virtual machine has been working quite well for my Programming honors course so I feel ok about that. Having students share a screen with me has also been working well for trouble shooting.

For now, it is the end of a long week and I am looking forward to relaxing a bit. The differentness of teaching online is a bit more stressful than I am used to. It is like starting the school year all over in a new school. But the kids are being great so I have that going for me.

Oh and I have started playing with Microsoft Teams. It looks really powerful and has a ton of options I am only starting to explore. I wish I had tried it out sooner. I’m not ready to switch in mid stream though. At least now so far.

No comments: