Chris Juzwiak

Carnegie Grant, Fall 2005

Week 4

As of last Friday, Angela Morales has had two days of “system failure” in the computer lab where several of the computers were down. Although she called me at the beginning of class, and I rushed over with a lab technician, we could not resolve the problem on the spot. As a result, Angela had to juggle an uneven technical environment, with some students logged onto the class website and others shut out. Though she managed this potentially chaotic situation with poise, she nevertheless lost valuable class time and was not able to stay entirely on track with her lesson plans. In light of all the new challenges Angela is fielding with her class, this second system failure (a relatively rare event in our computer labs) seems especially unfair and unfortunate.

Early this week, Angela and I discussed how the two systems failures had derailed her objectives somewhat for the first five weeks of class. I encouraged her to slow down the pace a bit, allowing sufficient time to cover the materials that were interrupted during the lab snafus. Angela seemed pleased and optimistic about this slight modification and immediately recognized how two of the PPT presentations would provide excellent instructional opportunities. Quickly, she devised a series of lesson plans for the current and following weeks and began working with the PPT slides.

By the end of the week, Angela appeared more relaxed and confident about the progress in her class. We began discussing strategies for getting her students to stay current with the online exercises. First, I suggested delivering the exercises in small increments (1 to 3 quizzes, for example) and having a deadline of the next class meeting. So, instead of opening 20 quizzes and giving the students two weeks to complete them (a amorphous sort of assignment for many developmental students), it might be wise to start with just one or two quizzes and give the students two days to complete them; these sort of parameters seem much easier to manage for developmental students. As the semester progresses, the number of quizzes assigned per class meeting can be increased significantly as the students become accustomed to this routine.

Denise forged ahead with her implementation of the technology, adding more revised PPT slides to her website. She also posted several sample student essays on both her 189 and 191 websites. (I did the actual posting for her in FrontPage; she will learn this procedure in the spring.) Denise kept me quite busy revising quiz errors, opening quizzes, and posting the new and revised materials enumerated above. Denise’s biggest pedagogical challenge at this juncture seems to be balancing her use of the textbook (a resource that she is quite fond of) and the new electronic materials. To my mind, a “surplus” of excellent materials seems like an ideal challenge! At any rate, it will be interesting to see what choices Denise will make in response to this “dilemma” as the semester progresses. Angela has suggested that a small photocopied packet of materials may be a smart alternative to a full textbook, given the plethora of electronic materials available on the class website. Denise has already developed just such a packet for her 191 class and may do the same for her 189 class for next semester.