Yackin'

Blog for October 23rd

After creating my PBWiki for my LW teachers, I soon was able to use the YackPak feature on PBwiki to communicate with my teachers as well as give them the opportunity to do the same. I really enjoy the feature, as it seems to provide me with more streamlined communication. I talked one of my groups into trying it, but they seemed to prefer the Chatting option on PBwiki. Part of it, I think, had to do with the comfort they felt in 'broadcasting' their own voices. As we know, most adolescents have a high level of self-consciousness and they struggled with sending a message out without being able to look at and edit it first, like you can when chatting and texting; especially in relation to the academic endeavors they are embarking on for this LW experience. Overall, I would certainly use the YackPak feature to meet with my teachers, to meet with my colleagues, and to meet with any group I may be working with. I enjoy the ease of which it works and the clarity of the sound.
During my teaching internship at CrossWinds in Woodbury, part of our weekly teaching assignment was to meet with our small groups online through TappedIn. Since we were only seeing our students once a week outside of this, it was exciting to have the opportunity to chat with them one other time during the week. Each week there was a day and a time assigned which we were to log in from home (or wherever) and the students would log on from school and we were to have an online lesson/interaction related to the assignment we had given them in our prior meeting. Sounds like a good idea, no? Well, I think it could of been but it certainly did not pan out that way. In order for this to work, we needed time with the kids to actually show them how to use TappedIn. Every week it would take over 10 minutes for the kids to log in, 10 minutes for them to find us (their assigned teachers), and then another few minutes to locate the actual chat window, which often would disappear under the main window. It was a disaster. By the time we would finally connect, we would have between 5-10 minutes to chat - needless to say the typing skills of my middle schoolers did not allow for much to occur during this time.
I considered using TappedIn for the work with my LW teachers, but after being introduced to PBwiki I definitely saw the ease that I did not find with TappedIn. Given more time to explore TappedIn I might be able to improve my opinion of it, but for now I have no problem taking a couple year hiatus from the program.