iSean

as i analyze data from student surveys conducted late last year there is much that is surprising me pleasantly. as i have previously noted, i surveyed well over 700 students in grades 6 – 12. one of the questions i asked was how often students use a computer at home.

that’s over 30% using a computer at home for more than an hour a day. 80% are socializing with friends during this time as well as surfing the internet for fun. however, 75% also report to doing homework on the computer at home, so that’s a respectable showing. heh. playing games on the computer was also high at 65%.

amazingly enough, 63% of these students report that they have a wireless network at home (16% weren’t sure). best of all is that under 3% reported having no internet connection and fewer than 10% had just dial-up. i should point out that this district is would be classified as mostly middle class (e.g., lower middle class to regular middle class).

more to come . . .

WordPress MU ended up failing for my use. Almost all of my students now use blogger.com with 1 student choosing to have me install a wordpress blog for just his use (not WordPress MU; rather, regular WordPress). i wonder if the Buddypress plugin caused my WordPress MU installation to fail? in any regard, my WordPress MU installation was determined to try and create the URLs like this (student_chosen_name.seanlancaster.com/blogging/) but students were not able to post a new entry to this address. i had a blog on this site as well and my blog entries showed up like this: seanlancaster.com/blogging/the_date_entered_and_title or something like that. that method worked, but none of the add-on accounts followed suite. i had made a test account and it worked just fine when i tested things, but i think i made the test account prior to installing Buddypress so who knows? i had to quickly drop the notion of using my own blogs via WordPress MU. ah well.

my university just shifted all student email to Google’s Gmail accounts. everyone has access to Google Docs using these accounts as well. unfortunately, the student Gmail accounts do not include the use of blogger.com. so we hit our second wrench. each student had to sign up for a second Gmail account to then have access to blogger.com. what a hassle. and my university doesn’t give me a Google account through the university so i couldn’t test this stuff out prior to class starting.

in the end, we made it through week 2 and i think there should be some pretty smooth sailing from here on out. i am still contemplating the use of Diigo and maybe twitter, but i’d like to let students get accustomed to the new tools we’re now using first.