New Laptops in the New Year

 I'll be introducing laptops in some/all of my classes in the new year.  They'll be available for reference, for practice with using a computer in English, and for Internet access (for purposes related to reaching learning or employment goals).  I already drag my (very heavy) personal laptop to the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  We use it as a reference/video/audio resource during lessons and I use it for email and data between classes.  (OK, and the occasional blogging!)  But I've stopped letting learners sit at my laptop.  For one thing, I don't always remember to log out of my email, Facebook and other accounts and I'd like to maintain appropriate student-teacher privacy levels.  Also, my laptop once was infected with malware after unmonitored student surfing, which cost me time and money to fix (and I lost some data that I hadn't backed up).

The laptops are coming from a grant (yay!) and will be maintained by my employer's IT contract.  I want to use them to benefit the students while also keeping the focus on a materials-light approach.   I'll be posting on that experience as it unfolds.

In related news, I was pleased to see a very helpful link to a collection of rubrics for assessing digital projects on Free Technology for Teachers this morning.  The cursor hovered over "Reflection Journal Rubric" for a few seconds. Uh oh, how will my own blogging shape up?  Whew, the rubric is at a high enough level that I'm safe!  When I determine what a proper format is for "teacher's reflective online journal", I might be in trouble, though ...