The SETDA online course I'm enrolled in now followed one I completed previously. I recognized a few of the names from the roster as former colleagues in the last course. I made some new friends online and read, used, and shared information from the course assignments with my work team members. The California budget kept me from participating as fully as I would have liked because I was tasked with providing compelling reasons why positions shouldn't be cut- which took hours and hours of time.
Since the organization I work for does not allow reading or posting on blogs or wikis using company computers, most of the course assignments had to be completed after work using my own computer at home. It was a somewhat frustrating experience for me because I really wanted to be able to use some of the Web 2.0 tools to help connect and communicate with the middle grades educators in this state. I spent a lot of time talking with our IT department, trying to get sites unblocked so I could access course resources. Each site that was blocked required a separate phone call and follow up email, a justification as to why I needed to access that particular site, and my signature acknowledging that the site would only be unblocked for a limited amount of time and that I didn't plan to do anything subversive with the information found on the site. *sigh
I do believe that Web 2.0 tools are of great benefit in education. I was happily surprised to learn today that my department is contemplating developing online content to be posted on iTunes University. It helps to know that other states are experiencing non-assistance from their IT departments, too. We can't give up!
Monday, May 24, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Getting Started
For the past few years, part of my responsibility has been to create content for the sections on Relevance and on Leadership for the California Department of Education's portal for middle grades educators, "Taking Center Stage--Act II" or TCSII (http://pubs.cde.ca.gov/tcsii) .
This is year two since the portal has gone live. It has only been within the last six months that we have begun to track Web hits to find out which parts of the portal receive the most traffic and at what times of the day most people visit the site. It was surprising to learn that although the portal was created to be used by middle grades teachers, it is actually education adminstrators who seem to be using it the most. When teachers do use the site, we found that they access the portal from their home computers, most often between the hours of 7:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m. Focus group feedback determined the reason for this activity peak is twofold: 1. teachers don't have time during the school day to go online and 2. technology infrastructure at the school site does not support quick downloading of information or streaming of the many videos posted on the site. We must explore other ways to get the word out and to make it easier for teachers and others to quickly locate and access the information they need.
This is year two since the portal has gone live. It has only been within the last six months that we have begun to track Web hits to find out which parts of the portal receive the most traffic and at what times of the day most people visit the site. It was surprising to learn that although the portal was created to be used by middle grades teachers, it is actually education adminstrators who seem to be using it the most. When teachers do use the site, we found that they access the portal from their home computers, most often between the hours of 7:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m. Focus group feedback determined the reason for this activity peak is twofold: 1. teachers don't have time during the school day to go online and 2. technology infrastructure at the school site does not support quick downloading of information or streaming of the many videos posted on the site. We must explore other ways to get the word out and to make it easier for teachers and others to quickly locate and access the information they need.
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