Journal+Reflection+6

[|Survey Results]- these are the results of the student survey

__**Interesting Technology Links**__

http://www.edzone.net/~mwestern/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCrd8Sqf4ig

http://etc.usf.edu/te_mac/index.html Source of photograph: http://www.suno.edu/ITC/images/Information_Technology.jpg

This was our last week before break and we implemented our survey this week. The survey was a disaster in some ways and valuable in others. Disasters of the week included having the wrong surve links which caused my students to fill out the survey under the name of Mr. Sierra, having computers that simply do not work well enough to even navigate to the start menu (I will go into this point further), and that we never came up with a good way to differentiate between the students who took the survey multiple times because they take more than one class from the team members (i.e. I had students who had mr. sierra, mrs. bucher, and myself).

When it comes to frustration nothing is worse than having computers that do not work. The computers we have in one lab are not that old. I remember when that lab was created around 2 years ago and the everyone was excited that we had a third lab with new Dell computers. In 2 years these computers have been utterly ruined. Drives are missing, the computers have so much junk on them that they cannot even open up the start menu effectively. Navigating the Internet and even right clicking is cumbersome and oftentimes impossible. Students are greeted with frustrating wait times, program crashes, and a general slowness the the computer that severely handicaps their ability to do what they need to do.

This is ridiculous. This is the fault of all of our teachers and administrators. Students cannot be expected to embrace and learn how to use technology if the technology is so poor that they cannot work. Moreover, our monitoring of these technological resources must be better. Kids are kids, they will make mistakes and do silly things. But effective monitoring could alleviate much of this. If we could monitor effectively we could give these students the computers and technology they desreve.

This also shows the need for students to learn about [|netiqutte] and appropriate technology use. These are challenges our teachers and administrators need to take on. We could blame the students, but if students are given technology without knowing how to use it, how can they be held totally responsible. We would never give a 12 year old the keys to a mercedes benz and say "its all your fault" when they don't know how to shift, ruin the transmission, and crash the car. We must educate students how to use technology in the right way.

happy holidays

[|A new sleigh for Santa from GE]