I kicked off the student survey part of my AR project today. I wasn't sure it was going to happen. My parent permission slips didn't get approved on time because my principal was in the hospital (he's ok now, he had a silent heart attack). So, they were approved a week late, got them translated into Spanish by two GREAT ladies in the office (one a former student) on Tuesday, printed and in the teacher's hands on Wednesday.
I learned from week 1 assignment in School Community Relations that some Hispanic people seem uncaring or aloof about their child's education when they really are illiterate. My school has an automated phone calling system that can send out a short message in, not only English and Spanish, but also text! So I asked my principal for permission to use this system (note: I need to add this to my plan). The office was expecting a lot of calls and I came in early Thursday morning to field those calls. There was only one. Success?
I thought I had everything in place. Glitches were bound to show up and boy did they!
- Friday (the day of the survey) was a half day. Traditionally we hold in 4th period. No one is using the computer lab during 4th period and I would have about 3 hours. Well. The schedule was changed at the end of the day on Wednesday to run our morning schedule! Now, not only would I not have the lab, but I would have classes to teach. Arg!
- Some teachers did not pass out the permission slips on Wednesday. They didn't pass them out on Thursday either. In fact, some where passing them out when I came by to pick up the students and their permission slips to take them to the lab. (my principal's comment was "welcome to my world")
- The plan was to put the link on this blog so that it would be easy to load each computer. Except, the computers wouldn't load this page. errrr
- Plan B - my assistant is a computer techie on the side. He loaded the link from the survey site on his zip drive and loaded as many computer he could before heading off to another campus to teach a class (I owe him at least a lunch). Except, see below.
- Between the slow processors on the lab computers (can you say it's long overdue for an update?), and the firewall on the school server, things went a LOT slower than planned. A 5 minute survey, if they read slow, was taking 15 to 20 minutes. Although, I do suspect a few dragging their feet because they didn't want to go back to class. For some, it just locked up as it was loading their next page. I didn't even get half of the classrooms done.
Major learning today:
1. "ctrl H" - brings up the history so I could reload the survey site quicker
2. The F5 key refreshes the screen and starts the survey all over again
3. The survey website is awesome as it tracked completed surveys as well as the incomplete ones. I can just take out the messed up ones that happened from resetting the webpages.
4. There's a reason technology needs to be updated more often.
I need to find more time to survey the other students that didn't have a chance to take the survey today. I need to go farther into the lists for my focus group because at this time, very few of the names I have, have turned in a permission slip. Some brainstorming with the school secretary has her looking into someone to run the lab for me on our next half day (two weeks) since I am out at a contest that day. Any student that is one of my students can take the survey during my class. I have no idea when I can do the focus groups and they are the critical point in putting the action into my research.
I have this week's reading to do for my class this time. My brain is gone for the night, so I will get to it in the morning. I hope everyone else is doing well on their AR.
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