Summer Workshop Reflections

Day 1

I felt like a real dummy today. At 8:25 I made my way to the Education building for my class. I knew the date. I remembered the teacher. I was pretty sure it was face to face on USU campus The staff in the Instructional Technology office finally found a minute to give me attention between important social interchanges; I felt stupid because I thought they should know that Sandie was teaching this week. Big surprise! After trying to call Sandie, they point me to room 230.

It was locked and dark so I found an open computer lab to check the web CT site one last time. The response was the same, "Class not activated." No new email, humph. I check banner to see if anything is listed there. Oh yeh, the class number is InsT 5520, section SLW. How stupid could I be? SLW must mean it is in Salt Lake.

90 minutes later, the receptionist at the Murray extension is the first smile I've seen all day. He checks for 5520, no, nothing here. "Let me call someone," he politely offers. "Thank you," I reply. "The person is away right now, I'll try again in a few minutes," he suggests. Finally he determines that the class is in Logan and that they can link the EdNet classroom with an open room in Murray. We spend the next hour together, virtually, via the miracle of technology. We determine that I could travel back to Logan over lunch to see a former student's final project.

90 minutes later, the presentation is underway and I find an open seat I had seen earlier from 80 miles away. Tom Davidson, a high school science teacher at Box Elder HS, presented his final project. It was well done. It appeared very professional, clean, detailed, and well organized. Tom admitted he had spent as much as 200 hours, confessing it was a little "over the top." The objective however was to expose us to a good final project. It does look like a lot of work but it is in fact "doable." Tom's email is tomrdavidson@gmail.com

We move then to the computer lab, room 230!!! where we create a gmail account and a blogger account. We will use Blogger as a "Design Log" to document the design process of our final project. We will use the documents feature of Google to create a Wiki. This was a surprise to me, I had heard of Google documents but did not realize they are a Wiki, duh. They are not the full featured version like some hosted Wikis but it works for a quick shared document, awesome.

When I get back to my accommodations, I log into the Web CT one more time to see if anything has changed with the InsT 5520 class. I get the same error message. Then I read the fine print, If you get this error message your instructor may have chosen to deliver the class by some other method. I feel stupid all over again.