After Class 1

Congratulations everyone, you made through our first class. All you guys were great!-funny, bright, accepting, responsive and very open.

I hope that you found the experience low stress, and enjoyable. I hope as well that you'll take much useful information away with you during and after the course because of what you've seen here..

IMPORTANT: Carefully record all usernames and passwords that you create each day (and every day actually) so that you don't find yourself wasting time looking for files that you need!

This blog is going to be one way that we stay in touch, given the fact that one of the classes will take place on line in real time (synchronous) and some of the course will be asynchronous. An overriding concern of mine has always been the comfort level of my students, since I believe that it has a direct correlation to how readily and enthusiastically the technology will be transferred to the classroom. To that end I will reiterate what we do in the course here and in my office at a virtual professional development center called Tapped In (http://tappedin.org).

Please make sure to check both sites during the week. As you know it's important that we set aside a regular time to perform that checking each week. In asynchronous classes, assignments get viewed by classes over the course of the week-and sometimes in an untimely way that does not allow enough time for thought and responses.

I'm acutely aware of the incredible demands on every classroom teacher. I think that you'll see that in the flexibility of the way in which I conduct my courses. We do need, however, to touch base a couple of times each week, no matter how briefly. In addition, please let me know as soon as necessary if anything I can control is causing you undue stress.

Yesterday, we did brief introductions, discussed our schedule of classes, traded email addresses, (mine as you know is egroves@comcast.net), visited my office at TappedIn and set up accounts and offices for you there, discussed blogs and set up one for each of you at eBlogger.

Please be patient with our pace whether it be, in your view, too slow or too quick. I'll try individualize it and tailor the material covered to each of you as best I am able.

Ok, let's get started with a short assignment:

Please go to the Websites of the two listservs that you chose to subscribe to yesterday. Since you could not have as yet received a deluge of information from them, which would happen over time, please go to their respective archives, do a search, and locate what you would consider two high quality lessons that you would use with your students. Next please cite them in your blog along with a couple of paragraphs outlining their purpose and your rationale for using them.

If it all works, each one of us should get an email notification from everyone else. Then please go to each of your colleague's blogs and make brief note of (hopefully) affirmation.

All of this will make you more comfortable with listservs, searching within them, and collaboration through blogs.

Even though you will receive this material as a email initially, please go to the blog itself for viewing at: http://mec-researchclass-sp2010.blogspot.com/

I will be off the tether from now till Tuesday during the day, so my responses won't appear till then.

Enjoy the holiday with your families tomorrow.

Eric