Reflection on my first computer suite chaos

Last week I took my class of Year 6's for their first computer time 'slot' in our wonderful computer suite, which has enough computers so each student can work on their own computer even with 'broken' computers. I had decided to do the Multiple Intelligence (MI) test that Jamin of Education Investigation guided me towards. I wanted to start with this to focus my students on being learners at school and that each one of them have strengths in different areas which make them unique.

Feeling quite pleased with myself we had a discussion about MI's and then I proceeded to write the VERY VERY long URL on the whiteboard, while my students copied it into their address field. Here everything started to go VERY wrong. Being such a long URL [http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/index.htm] with the various underscores and backslashes it took about half an hour of fixing spelling and other errors before I had everyone on board. We had a fairly successful session of what time we had left and they were very excited to learn about their learning strengths.

At the end of the day we all reflected on the process. I admitted my error and explained how I would do it better next time by providing a shorter URL using Tiny URL which is now here: [http://tinyurl.com/32nx7v] What a difference!

My students after some discussion realised the importance of spelling when typing URLs and some also admitted they did not use the continuum correctly, choosing either one extreme or the other. Although I did discuss it, I feel I should have modelled this further.

So what next? I have decided to repeat the exercise this week incorporating our reflections and then compare their results of the previous week. I believe we will all see how we have learnt from the process.