Dawn,
Well my semester got off to a rocky start. It started on thursday, 1/16. On that day my cyber kids went on a tour of their class web site and checked everything else. On Friday, we watched the powerpoint on using FrontPage and they started putting up their web sites. Then My father-in-law died and we had to go to north Carolina so i missed the next Monday, tuesday and Wednesday. I had them watch October Sky while I was gone since they had just started this cyber class and had no idea what they were doing yet. When i got back last thursday and friday, they worked on writing their october Sky essays, and also on the practice peer review exercise that is on Ted's site. They also chose partners and books for their partner book project. Now this week I feel like we are really getting started, but we have been doing a variety of things, working on websites, OS essays, finishing practice peer reviews, peer reviewing their OS essays and revising them. They also did one cyberjournal, but they did it in Word and will put it up on their website this week. I am devoting today and tomorrow to everyone getting their websites started. They should have their homepage, their web folio cover page, a page for their October Sky essay and a page for their Cyber Journal up by thursday and on Friday should be able to cyber journal online and finish up the october sky essays and start their first short story project.
How long do you devote at the beginning to teaching them FrontPage and getting the start of their websites up? Once they understand how to add new pages and actually do a couple, i know it will be very easy for them, but I think it will take about four days to teach 20 kids Frontpage and get those initial pages up. It seemed to go faster last semester, but then we actually had done some writing first and the kids put up their webpages after they had something to put on it.
As to reactions from colleagues? Mixed. My department chair is very supportive and loves my site. A couple have said amazing site and that they are going to borrow some of the assignments from it, but they aren't going cyber, A few are tight lipped and say "we aren't going to have to do this are we?" And some are completely indifferent. However, One of our biology teacher's wants to work with me next year and get her class on line and so with the principal's help, we are going to set up the two classes with the same students. We will have to have the same kids in comp also in my second semester forms of fiction class since English classes are one semester and biology classes are all year. But i think many collegue's feel threatened, like if I do this they will be forced to too.
I am presenting a session on integrating the WWW into English Classes with Darcy Randle at the South Dakota Council of Teacher's of English Conference the end of March.
Pat