Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Teaching From Home–Day 7

Well this is the new normal I guess. We had snow last night and several students missed homeroom this morning. I am assuming it is because of power outages in the area. No calling a snow day or even a two hour delay.

My big effort today was getting all of my freshmen connected to our virtual machines so we could start with Visual Studio. I’ve though about trying some other online programming environment but there really isn’t time to plan everything all over again on a new platform and in a new programming language

The good news from today is that all of my freshmen were able to connect to the virtual machines and run Visual Studio.  The less good news is that getting a first program to make sure it all works took the whole hour..

I think part of the problem is that students usually have to switch windows from the presentation to their own projects. Wouldn’t it be great is students had two monitors on their computers at home? Not happening of course. Still most of the students were able to create a working program. I still have to check if all of the projects were saved in the right place. I know that one was not. That one was also created in C# and not Visual Basic. That always happens. Both saving in the wrong place and starting with the wrong programming language.

Next on my agenda today is making a recording of what I wanted students to do today so that a few students who fell behind can watch it and catch up. I have a hunch someone may have walked away from his computer thinking he wouldn’t miss anything important. I wonder if I am going to wind up recording a lot of things. Recording the whole class doesn’t seem like it would work. There is too much extra stuff going on. Recording a special tutorial may be faster and easier than editing the meeting file.

So the learning goes on.

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