Trial Run, Week 3

Our trial run is nearly over! It would have been over today, but Medina's class was so stressed by the deadline that I told him his students could have until this Tuesday to finish up their projects. Medina was very hesitant to extend the deadline, but I think some groups really needed it. I think he's really trying to enforce deadline responsibility onto his students, which is good.

I actually heard from my groups a little bit more this past week, which was good. The one thing about this trial run has been that the college mentoring has not worked as well as I'd hoped, but I did hear from my groups this week and was able to advise them, so I hope that helped them.

I'm working on putting together the final survey this weekend, so the students can take the exit survey early next week. I'm also going to arrange an exit interview with Medina to clear up a couple of questions I have for the final paper/presentation, which we have already started preparing for.

So, I think everything is coming together nicely. We're just tying up a few loose ends at this point and hopefully the trial run will be complete by early next week.

Trial Run, Week 2

Our trial run is in its second week and its going pretty well I think despite some roadblocks. We've really been focused on this trial run in these last few weeks of the semester. The Hickman High School trial run didn't work out just because we ran out of time and didn't think we would have enough resources to supply to their students, so this is the last big thing we're doing for our research.

I've been communicating a lot with Mr. Medina, the high school teacher in New York and he's been the one who's been really excited about this trial run. We got the second round of weekly reports from the groups who according to Medina are working very hard to meet their tight deadline next Friday, when the trial run officially ends. Some of the students have also took the mid-term survey.

The main problem we're having with the trial run is that despite all the e-mails we've sent out to our individual groups none of them have responded to us. In the survey, the students said that they didn't hear from their college mentors (i.e. us), which is so weird since we've all e-mailed them at least once. So the college mentoring isn't going as well as we'd hoped, but everything else seems to be going fine. It'll be interesting to see the actual stories that are produced next week. They had three weeks to produce two multimedia elements, so we'll see what they come up with. I'm looking forward to it!

Trial Run!

Our trial run has finally begun! We are so excited about it and I am so happy it has finally started! Mr. Medina's class in Endicott, New York has been divided into six groups and each of us has taken on two groups and are communicating with them regularly.

I started the week by having a long conversation with Mr. Medina and making sure we were all on the same page about the three week trial run and we were all on the same page. He had his class take our introductory survey, e-mailed me the names and e-mail addresses of his group members who have already picked stories to report on for the three-week period of time, and we have each taken on two groups and have started communicating with them.

I'm excited that we seem to be off to a good start here. Mr. Medina seems excited about the trial run, despite all the things we have to have him do for us and we're excited to have him participate. Hopefully his students are just as excited but we'll see as we continue to communicate with them.

The trial run/extended focus group with Hickman High School is coming along a little bit slower because we've been so focused on this trial run, but I have no doubt that the Hickman trial run will happen eventually too. We're very excited that we're making progress on this trial run and look forward to the results that it will eventually yield.

Prepping for Trial Runs

This week was all about preparing for our trial runs. Our trial run with Ed Medina's class in New York begins on Monday, so I worked on finalizing everything with him and making sure he and I were on the same page with everything and his students were all ready to start working on their stories on Monday. We are very excited that this is going to be starting on Monday and lasting three weeks. We put the final details on everything this past week and I feel like we are ready to go on Monday. We will monitor the class, which will be divided into groups, thoroughly and receive weekly updates from them and Mr. Medina and survey them weekly, so we have many ways to monitor their progress. We are very excited to get this trial run started!

We also worked this week on getting the trial run/extended focus group started with Kim Pettlon's class at Hickman. We want to make the trial run with her class more technology based and see how into the technology her class is and how much they take away from it. We had a very in depth discussion on what we want to do with her class and a lot of it will just depend on what technology her class has available, which we are unsure of. So we have a few more things to find out from her, but after that we want to get the trial run with her class going soon.

I think we're in a really good place right now. These two trial runs are the final stages of our research and I have every reason to believe they will go very smoothly, although Kim Pettlon's class will take a lot of work to plan since Mr. Medina's class trial run has been planned out for a while now.