Online Resources in the Classroom

The past couple of weeks I have been pushing my students to try and "keep up" with snow days.  I told my Algebra 1 classes before the snow days that if we were to have school off, they should check Blackboard for their online assignment.  On the actual snow day, I communicated this via email, Blackboard announcement, posted a tweet on Twitter, and sent Remind101 texts, and still only 13/29 students completed the assignment in one class, with a similar number in the other.  I asked them to watch one video that I posted on Blackboard (roughly 4 minutes long) and complete a short 5-question homework assignment through Ecart (also on Blackboard), which they could take up to 3 times.  I was shocked that students claimed to still "not have known" about this, because I sincerely could not come up with any other ideas of how to communicate this.  I understand that Algebra 1 is not on every student's mind each snow day, but when you have hardly gone to school this winter, I thought it might cross their minds at least once.

I was and am appalled with this because these students are obsessed with their phones.  I really cause probably the worst part of their days when they have to surrender their devices to my "phone box", but how the heck do they (and we) expect student success if they clearly cannot figure out how to use this technology?  Don't get me wrong, a handful of students completed the assignment, but it just blows me away.

Each year, the students become more and more "attached" to their phones, and I am almost to the point where I can assume every student has one.  It's a wild thought to me, especially since I know they don't all have Internet, but I realized it when my homeless student had a better smart phone than I did this year.  To be quite honest, I don't know who or how this is being paid for, but if she has a phone, I feel like this is a fair assumption I can make.  This excites me a bit too, because I can really implement phone use outside of school into my lesson plans as long as I know students can receive my texts and access Blackboard somehow.