As has been mentioned by a fellow blogger who is also attempting to go paperless this semester, one of the unintended consequences of this effort has been that I don’t know more than three or four of my students names.  And I only know them because:

  1. They are male (in my class of 24 I have 3 men)
  2. They are technologically incompetent, so I have to keep resetting things in blackboard for them
  3. They are whiners who CONSTANTLY complain about every little thing, even the truly unimportant things

In the past when I was handing back homework each class I would get to know their names.  By this point in the semester I pretty much had it down.

Not this semester.  I not only don’t know them yet, I can’t imagine how I will learn them.  The repetition isn’t there.

Attendance, the iphone app, has a feature that allows you to take a picture and attach it to the name.  However 1st generation ipads don’t HAVE cameras and I don’t have an iphone.  I could take the pictures on my android phone, but then linking them up would be difficult.

I did find a few references to ways to learn names, some of which had a LOT of different ideas.  I’m going to put them here both for your reference and mine.  I need to come back to this before next semester.

I may eventually put this into a single doc and see which ones appear most often and which ones are unique, but that should be enough to get started.

I have 2 big issues with some of these ideas so far, however.  First, many are not paperless, thereby defeating the point.  Second, many are VERY time-consuming as far as class time.  For example, many of the UNL suggestions will teach the STUDENTS each others names as well as teaching them to you.  At the cost of probably an entire class period.  That would definitely require some pre-planning.

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