Surprised by Technology?

I’d like to second profmomof1′s comments: I don’t think we take seriously enough the need to invest time and resources to learn to effectively use technology.  Some of our students are surprisingly adept, but some are not — and we have to serve all of them.  My question is always about the ratio of classroom time in teaching the software/technology to learning benefits. Small learning curve with obvious benefits=good technology. 

I’ve found turnitin.com to be a very useful tool all around, but some features aren’t as good as others.  The originality reports are good.  The grademark function is good. The gradebook is good, but I wish we could leave comments with individual gradebook items and had more options for attendance keeping.  The ETS grammar checker, on the other hand, is almost worthless.  I spend more time deleting wrong comments (flags header information as fragments, doesn’t understand inline citations, mistakes comma splices for run-ons, misidentifies fragments regularly) than I would adding manually the few comments that I choose to keep.  That’s really too bad, as ETS comments include a link to the rule, which is a good feature.

 Two things:
1)  My university’s CMS is a flavor of Sakai.  I’m so used to clunky web interfaces, I’ve moved passed “frustration” to “resignation.”  I was expecting many tasks to be annoying and time consuming.  One of the biggest annoyances is the inability, in most web interfaces, to upload or download multiple files at once; you have to save/upload each file individually.
But I was surprised that while our CMS does indeed have this kind of web interface, it also allows you to connect to its filespaces as a shared drive.  I could have the CMS space as a file folder on my computer, and just drag and drop all the readings in there at once!  Also, students can upload their essays to their individual boxes, and I can download them all at once organized by folders named with each student’s email ID.  What convenience!  It’s just a reminder that these tools are evolving (if slowly) to respond to user needs.  If you have given up on using IT in the classroom because you found it inadequate before, take another look!

2) I have students use the CMS forum feature to post a discussion question for each day’s reading, mostly so they come to class prepared with something to talk about.  Sometimes students just post their required question and never look further.  But some classes have really run away with it.  The forum is based on one of the free templates used everywhere on the internet (phpBB, I think), so students are already very familiar with how to use it.  Sometimes they really get into the discussion, going back and forth, using [quote] functions to highlight quotes from the texts and each other’s posts and make some point.  Not only is this a way for the class to extend beyond our three hours a week, it’s great when it comes time to talk about how to structure essays!

I have just recently been surprised to discover that there is no straightforward way to use mail merge to generate multiple files. Either I can have individual email messages or one file with each ‘letter’ as a separate file. I am sure there are ways around this, but not obvious or quick ones. I would have thought this sort of feature would be in high demand.

The context by the way was hoping to set up my grading rubric as a google form, and then download the resulting spreadsheet and use it to generate a pdf with feedback for each student which could be uploaded to our CMS. The emails option won’t do, since the privacy laws where I live prohibit sending grades or other feedback by email.