To make it very, very clear, this is my "personal narrative" post for the week. I will post my analysis of text post later today before class.
So, this last week I had the brilliant idea of doing a very small "multi-modal" project with students involving FaceBook and the "Pieces of Flair" application. Assuming that they all had Facebook accounts, and had synced and activated their Kent State email accounts (I had been emailing them assignments, updates, etc. since the second day of class three weeks ago), I walked into 213 Sattefield Hall Friday thinking I was in for one of the easiest classes of the semester. Uff. So, not only did 6 of my students not have Facebook accounts, 2 students had somehow not even heard of Facebook, and one was stressing out about starting an account because she was worried that someone would assume her identity (I eventually convinced her that it was ok to put false information into the profile, so long as I knew it was her account). To complicate matters, at least 7 students had not synced and activated their Flashline account, so they couldn't log into the classroom computers at all. With one of my students trying her best to help multiple people sync up their accounts, but having little luck, in the end I logged in these 7 students as me into the laptop at their table, and then rushed a 10 minute demo on how to use the Microsoft "Paint" function to make image files so that they could make flair (for anyone here that doesn't know what flair is...basically you take an image--be it an image of text or a picture--and you make electronic buttons to post on your "flair board" on your Facebook profile. You can also trade these buttons and collect others that people have made...). I asked several times...did anyone have any questions? Any problems? Nope, they are good. Easy as pie.
Well, it is now four and a half hours before class...and 15 of 25 students have completed the assignment.
Technology...it's my friend! *sighs*
Elliot
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An addendum: If any of you know how to sync up passwords and activate Flashline accounts, I'd love a little tutorial. I had one of the wonderful tech guys help me do my account the week before classes started, and I figured I would never need to know how to do this again...silly me.
E.
I've had problems with the computer literacy of my students both this and last semester--which I've found odd, because I'm still not sure how it's possible that the modern 18-19 year old doesn't possess at least basic computer skills.
My classes are almost entirely digital, and I've had a quite a few problems that never seem to go away. For one, Vista is an unintuitive, slow, and buggy piece of garbage that requires you to have a moderate to advanced computer literacy. Whoever designed this thing was obviously not thinking of who would use it; I've explained how to upload a file to Vista so much that I've memorized the speech.
Today, I had both of my classes post on outside blogs. I don't even want to explain how bad that went. Note: No one even knew what a blog was at the beginning of this semester.
I was also surprised that none of my students knew what Blogs were. About 70% of my students had never even heard of a blog - I made them go through the blog introduction that blogger provides. And now, most of them still don't know exactly what blogs are... but they are posting each week and responding, so that is a plus. What surprised me the most was that when I taught last spring at Ball State about 80% of my students already had personal blogs. So, is it that students are introduced to blogs in their freshman semester and get so excited that they continue to use them through the next semester, OR, are blogs just not as popular as they were a few years ago and students are using other things, such as Twitter? (of which my students did know what Twitter was).
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