iSean

week 1 is now behind us. as i’ve written earlier, i am teaching 3 sections of our undergraduate ed tech course (ED 205 — Computers in Education). two of sections are online courses and 1 section is face-to-face. i have given all of my students the option of attending the face-to-face session whenever they want OR completing the online session whenever they want. should be interesting to see how things play out over time.

in our first session, we covered much. we went over the syllabus, discussion parameters, took a survey on technology proficiency and how that relates to teaching, learned how to use the phpBB forums, and got signed up for the blogsome blogging tool. i think most students are figuring things out, but the blogging tool appears to be the most confusing part of the first week. as students signed up to use it, i would guess that the site just failed (e.g., critical database errors) with about 3 - 4 students per 25. nothing seemed to work and they were forced to just create a whole new account. other students received 2 passwords (they likely hit submit twice) and found that neither password then worked. i am not sure how this gets fixed. i’ve suggested requesting another new password, but they might be forced to create a new account as well. so, needless-to-say, i am holding off on our first blogging activities until we get the accounts set up completely. that’s really the only bump in the road.

i do survey my students at the end of each week. i learn much from the anonymous responses. for example, this week i saw more of this than i’d like, “Everything worked fine with the web site and with the class discussion forum. (If that is the right term). But I had a lot of trouble creating and logging into my Blog site.” i know i could have used Blackboard and this would have been a tool that most of my students were familiar with. it would also have been a tool that our university IT staff could have provided technical support to my students, but i really, really want my students (future teachers) to see that there are alternatives on the Internet that they can implement on their own, especially if their school does not provide Blackboard or similar tools to them. i also want them to see how i help them work through difficulties and how they can figure many things out on their own when push comes to shove. all in all, i think the blogsome site will work well, but it’s certainly not without its little bumps in the road early on.