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.
