Its been three weeks and I think I now can successfully call each of my students by name! I've had them asking them to fill in the daily check in form since I started assigning work. The response rate has varied on the day and some students are still surprised that they are suppose to be doing this daily. On average I've heard from 35 - 40 students per day (sadly thats less than 50% of the students). I guess my expectations regarding this were not as clear as I thought.
On the positive side, I have noticed that many of the students who are responding are beginning to put more thought into their reflections and are asking specific questions. This has helped to open up a dialogue with me and as a result I've already had more kids come in for help due to a brief email request than in the past as well as the number of emails I field on a regular basis from students has been significant. I have one student who is on a daily basis coming in to check with me after an online exchange back in early September when I mentioned that I'm in my classroom by 8 am. He has been waiting for me most mornings :) I've started using the google spreadsheet to keep track of my email responses to the students when they post a question. In some cases I've cc'd their parents just in case the email they provided was incorrect. I've received some very positive feedback from these parents as they see the online interactions that we are having.
On the negative side, there are still at least 5 or 6 students in each class who have never checked in along with a large number who have only done it once or twice. When I have asked them about it they have provided all sorts of reasons: my computer was not working (I'd be a millionaire for the number of times I've heard this), it wouldn't accept my responses (still not sure what this means), couldn't find the site (I've now created a JING to gently guide them to the website ... next year I'll have to send that right away!) and then the surprised ones who completely ignored what I was talking about when we were touring the site and figured it was directed at someone else. I wonder if there is a way next year to get them into the lab in the first week to have them walk through this with me .... maybe even fill in the contact info form right there. The challenge with that is the students often don't have passwords at that point so would be unable to use the school computers. I'll need to talk to Ron to see if there is a way to handle this.
So as we move forward into October I'm looking to tweak the original form to have them explain in their own words what they understand from the lesson. I need to get them away from saying the same thing every day ... "I understood it all". Not terribly useful. My plan to combat this is to copy of some of the responses so far (poor, ok and good) excluding the names of course and share them with the class.
