Week 14

From students’ perspective, this week was probably a very easy one – there were only two day’s of lessons. However, as I set Wednesday evening as the deadline for submission of final drafts of the second essay, it turned out to be my most demanding week. Some students were really organized and even got their essays in early so that they could go home to their families and relax not having to worry about me and my demands. However, the ball was now back in my court and I had the stress of getting everything graded by next lesson. Having a day in which you plan a bit, teach a bit and grade a bit is perfectly manageable. However, when you start grading at 7am and do nothing all day but grade, the lack of variety makes the whole process much more difficult. However, again I must say that I was generally pleased with the quality of the work I received as virtually all essays were comprehensible and to a greater or lesser extent demonstrated mastery of the art of writing synthesis. I had noticed but it came out in conversation in class that at least for one section, the class average grade for the second essay was higher than that for the first. Given the level of difficulty of the task, this was quite an achievement. Another reason for this higher average would be that a few weaker students who had been struggling to keep up had opted to drop the course and focus their attention and energies on their other courses.

Week 13

Time has flown. I of course have had to look forward to the end of course and plan what will happen for the last couple of weeks. When the week began, I could say that there were still three weeks left but the reality is that because of holidays lots of lessons will be missed. As mentioned before, it is clear that students feel a great sense of relief when they hand their essays over to me - they have worked hard on creating them and while they are in my possession for evaluation, students can let go of the responsibility and "take a breather". However, because I am so acutely aware of how little time there is left, I worked hard through the weekend to ensure that I could get all the essays back (at least those I had received on time) during the first lesson of the week. This meant that students only had the weekend to recover from the writing of the first draft. The ball was thrown back in their court and now they have to start worrying again. They may feel pressured by having to get their final draft in before their big Bayram but I hope that once they go home to their families and realise that they have no work from Comm 101 screaming to be done, they will appreciate that the final push was worth it in the end.

This week was another one of those busy weeks where I had to conduct compulsory tutorials, teach and grade late submissions. I haven't yet made a tally of who did and who did not attend a tutorial but there of course will be a few who will claim that they could not find a time to suit them. There were of course lots of slots on Monday and Tuesday that were never filled. I have also had students sign up for fifteen minutes before the deadline for submission of final drafts. I suspect that they haven't yet put two and two together and realised this but when they do and they try to book an earlier slot, they will of course be all filled.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I hope students can. There appears to be a few that can't. In fact there are a few that have fallen at the last fence. Some students appear to have just given up at the prospect of having to write the second essay. This is really a shame as they are so close to the end. One final push and they'd have it over with. However, they are now committing themselves to having to repeat the course next semester. Here's hoping it'll go well for them but from past experience I can only warn that because of how tired they'll be they may even have less energy next semester for jumping that last fence.

Week 12

This is the week in which students have to hand in the first draft of their second essay. They have been warned also that the quality of their second essay will have a bearing on the grades they will get for their final exam. The final exam will require them to write a similar essay to what they are doing now and so what they learn during the process of writing this essay will prepare them for their later exam. From discussions of the text in class and practical exercises we are doing, I feel that most students have a fairly good grasp of what it is they need to do. This whole idea of synthesis is quite new to most of them and it is understandable if they feel a little phased at first. It would be great if we had more time to do further practice but I’m afraid we don’t have that luxury. Teachers who have to constantly look forward and plan to the end of semester are acutely aware of what needs to be done and what time there is to do it. Students seem to survive from day to day and so don’t fully appreciate why particular deadlines need to be set. Unfortunately my course must proceed according to the schedule regardless of whether another instructor has organized a mid term on a particular day.

I left school at 1pm on Friday with a bag of essays to be graded over the weekend. The bag was not as heavy as it should have been. At least 30% of students missed the deadline for submission. What do they think is going to happen now I wonder?

Week 11

This week I learned from one student that when they got their grades for their first essays, many students were assuming that I was playing a trick on them and would eventually tell them to reverse the numbers in the grades. In other words if a student got 86% they were assuming that I would tell them it was only 68%. So, I guess I had deflated them so much that they didn’t really believe that they could do so well. However, it is clear that most students are really trying and paying attention to detail and responding to feedback. However, there were some students who were of course, rather unhappy with their grades. I remember one student in particular who had her essay returned to her at least three times because it was not three pages which was the minimum requirement. Each time she returned exactly the same essay which was still only two and a quarter pages long. Eventually I had to give up and just give her a token grade.

I had to miss one of my lessons on Wednesday morning in order to deal with an important administrative matter. When I turned up for my 12.30 lesson, one of the students demanded fair and equal treatment – he was of course suggesting that I cancel the lesson as I had had to do earlier. However, when offered fair and equal treatment – come in on Saturday morning for a makeup lesson – he declined and was quite happy to be treated “unfairly and unequally”.

Well, almost half of the overall grades for the course have now been allocated and so students should have a fair idea of how they are doing. Hopefully they will be able buckle down now for the home stretch and maintain the momentum that we have built up. However, this is the time of the semester when students tend to be overwhelmed by mid terms and find it difficult to keep up with all their work.

Week 10

I think most students were a bit overwhelmed when they left the first lesson of this week – due to the many homework assignments I had to give them. Students tend to like to put things off/postpone until a later date and so having just finished with Essay 1 they were probably expecting to be able to take a breather before commencing essay 2. Alas, today was the day on which I had to introduce them to task 2 and all they would need to do in preparation for writing. The deadline for submission of the first draft is only two weeks hence and because completing the task involves reading two texts, we have a lot of work to do in the next two weeks.

This week I decided to make students participants in their own study based on the first text we need to read for our next essay. I did have some qualms initially about doing it as some people may view it as ethically questionable. However, if students actually carry out the activities that the participants and researchers in the study did, then there is a much better chance that they will understand what it’s all about. In order to ensure that nobody gets hurt I have tried as much as possible to allow students to remain anonymous. However, I am not surprised to find that students can figure out which story was written by whom – mainly due to content or sometimes students are perfectly happy to draw attention to themselves and reveal with story is theirs.

This is the week in which I got finished grading the first essays. I must say that overall I was really quite impressed. Obviously there will be some students who are not at all happy with their grades but I am hoping that they can be realistic and see what areas they are weak in. Some students were clearly well satisfied with their grades. There were also the couple of incidences with tears as some work had to be rejected for not meeting basic standards. Again I detected a lot of nervous energy that was not being channeled appropriately. I genuinely feel that if students can learn to channel their energy more systematically and pay attention to detail then they will be able to achieve very high standards.

Week 9

The deadline for submission of final drafts of essay 1 was this week. For me this week was somewhat easier than last week as, although I had a complete week of teaching and conducting tutorials, at least I didn’t have any grading – or at least very little. There were the usual few who managed to slip “out of the loop”. The deadline for two of my sections was 12 noon on Friday. By then only 18 students in total (from two sections) had submitted their essays. I should of course have received almost this many for each section. However, this means less grading for me… Students wonder why they fail – again it’s normally because they don’t actually produce the work.

Although I felt that what I was doing in class was basically revision of skills that students would have learned earlier – in high school or in ELC – it emerged from discussions in tutorials that for many students it was their first time ever considering how a paragraph should be structured, how to write a topic sentence and then how to support it. Such discussions reinforce the need for going back to basics and taking nothing for granted.

Again this week some students have handed in their work early. It’s good to see that they are doing things as and when they have time. I try not to assign work for the next lesson but rather allow as much time as possible so that students can fit the work into their schedule. For those that are organized this seems to be working but for those who need the motivation of a deadline hanging over them, this simply means that on certain nights (before a deadline) there is a big backlog of work that needs to be caught up on.

As this was week nine I informed students of the fact that I will award 4% of their overall grade for the blogs they have done up until now. Until this week I had not allocated any grades and so I also warned students that almost half of their overall grade will become known within the next week or so. So, within a week they should all have a good idea of how they are doing on the course.

Again this week, one of my sections will have noticed that we had another visitor in class. Yes, I was peer observed again. I am sure students noticed that my observer did something that they are very careful not to do.

Week 8

At the end of last week students submitted the first drafts of their essays and so I had a wonderful weekend grading. Actually, although some students may feel rather disappointed with the feedback they got, I must say that overall I was really quite impressed with the quality of the work I received. It does seem that most students are making a genuine effort and when they take nothing for granted but systematically work on improving their writing – they really can do it. However, I continue to be dismayed at how students reduce all feedback to whether Mr O’Regan “liked” the essay. I even had one student accuse me of hating her essay. Even when they received a rubric (to which they had access even before writing their essays) with detailed feedback followed up by a tutorial in which the feedback is further discussed, the feedback is consistently summarized to “he likes it” and “he doesn’t like it”. Students will admit that they haven’t got a thesis or that they have one but it doesn’t address the task. They will admit to having no explanation for their choice of what to include/exclude from a summary. They will admit to having no particular reason for organizing their ideas in the way they have. They will admit to forgetting to enclose quotations in quotation marks…But yet…Mr O’Regan arbitrarily chooses to like or dislike an essay for some reasons known only to himself. One wonders if students’ main strategy to pass this course is to do a psychological profile of their instructor so that they can provide him with what he “likes”. Don’t they realize that he keeps telling them what he “likes”, he writes downs lists of what he “likes” so that they can easily check off the list as they provide what he “likes”. This week has been a particularly busy one for me as, as well as the normal teaching I have had to grade essays, conduct tutorials and attend lots of meetings. I am of course sympathetic to students when they document how much work to do but I seriously question how effectively they use their time. Of all the things that one could teach them, getting organized and using one’s time efficiently is perhaps one of the most important.

There are a few students who seem to be really on top of their work and even hand assignments in, up to a week before the deadline. Although the deadline is not until next Monday, a couple of students have handed in their peer reviews of podcasts. Students accuse me of being harsh but wait until they see this feedback. It was rather heartening for me to see that the students giving feedback were being totally honest if not being somewhat direct. I did fear that students would make superficial comments and claim that everyone’s podcast was wonderful in the hope that this would result in me giving everyone a high grade. However, if others are as blatantly honest as these first pair have been then I imagine that everyone will be thrilled with the grades they receive from me. Often students’ criteria (which they get from their own experience of viewing podcasts on the internet) is much harsher than mine. I am fully aware that most students have made a podcast for the first time and in a language that is not their own. I don’t expect them to be as proficient as those of other podcasters who have been at it for years.

We have done quite a bit of peer review this semester and so when I had one of my peers visit one of my lessons this week to review my teaching, it seemed only fair. However, as one would expect, students did not seem to be their normal bubbly selves. They were somewhat more subdued than usual. I have noticed this also in the past when being formally assessed as part of a teaching course. If students “dislike” a teacher and want to make him look bad in front of an observer what is it they ought to do? If they misbehave, this doesn’t necessarily make the teacher look bad – it simply makes the students themselves look bad…and how can they be sure that the observer isn’t really there to observe them and won’t report them to some higher authority. And what if students “like” their teacher and want to make sure he looks good in front of the observer? Unfortunately most of them seem to think that sitting quietly and listening to everything the teacher says is the best thing to do. They are reluctant to interact with the teacher for fear that they will respond inappropriately and make it look like he’s not doing a good job of teaching them. Of course the reality is that observers tend to be teachers themselves and they know exactly what is going on. The ideal observation is when students and teachers just continue as normal and behave as though there is no stranger in the classroom.

Week 7

This week went rather quickly as Monday was a national holiday and so two sections of the class only convened on one occasion this week. For the third section we managed to more thoroughly look at the elements of a good summary – something we had not done previously because of a missed lesson over Seker Bayram. Wednesday’s and Thursday’s lessons were somewhat predictable. This was when I collected the first drafts of essay 1. I could detect a considerable amount of nervous energy in the air. After students have worked intensively on an assignment for a few days, there seems to be a great sense of relief in handing it over to the instructor – it is no longer their responsibility and once I have it they can relax and don’t have to do anything further. Therefore to many students’ dismay, their essay was deemed unacceptable because it was incomplete. What a catastrophe? As I have stressed from the beginning of the course, the main reason for students failing this course, semester after semester is that they will just not listen to or read and follow instructions. Their first instruction was to include their instructions with their essay. If only they would keep the instructions in front of them while working on an assignment and consult them regularly, then there is some chance that they might actually follow them. However, although students may be working hard and doing their best, there is no sense of organization: systematically working their way through a process. As mentioned earlier, there seems to be this buildup of nervous energy as a deadline approaches and instead of being methodical and systematic to doing a task, students just throw all their energy into it often being unsure as to what exactly it is they ought to be doing. As I said to them many times, even if they just learn to do what they are told on this course, then that will be a great achievement.

Also this week students were assigned the task of listening to each other’s podcasts. With one of my student’s help I believe that I have now managed to “host” all of the podcasts on my website, despite the variety of formats and file sizes with which I was provided. Because of these podcasts, my website has more than doubled in size. Out technical department understandably may not have been too happy with having to give me so much space but I will have to endeavour to keep my site to it’s current size and avoid further expansion.

Week 6

The week began with a whole lesson on discussing the questions that students had begun discussing in groups in the last lesson. It was clear that many students hadn’t done any further work on them and that whatever work they had done was superficial. Because this was a building task leading towards their essay, I know that the quality of the work they did on these questions will be reflected in the quality of their essays. The dynamics in each of the classes was strikingly different when discussing this assignment. For one class eliciting responses was like pulling teeth while for another, ideas were freely volunteered and students even elaborated on each others responses and challenged my perceptions.

The homework assigned after the first lesson was to make a list of characteristics/features/devices that can be employed by writers to make their argument more convincing. Students were expected to do this by trying to recall what they had learned in writing lessons in the past and then by consulting their course handbook. I myself did the task but confined my list to those I could find in the course handbook. I came up with a list of over 50 items which took me over an hour to compile. When I glanced at students work at the next lesson, I found considerably shorter lists and when I questioned how long it had taken I found that students were obviously a lot more efficient than me.

In the last lesson of the week I stressed that students should leave the classroom feeling confident that they know exactly what they are going to do in the writing of their essay. If there is anything they are unsure about they should book a tutorial. However, the week is now ended and no one has booked a tutorial. Am I to assume that everyone clearly understands what is expected of them and that I will be receiving high quality essays next week?

The beginning of the week was rather gratifying as although the deadline for podcasts was 5pm on Friday, the assignment began trickling in as early as Monday. This was good for me as I was able to use these podcasts to sort out some technical difficulties with hosting them on my website. At the end of the week when the deadline arrived and I tried transferring students files to my website, I found that I quickly ran out of disc space. I immediately contacted our CIT department but of course they had already left for the long weekend. And so we will have to wait a few more days to see/hear what each other has produced. Of the 44 students registed in my classes – only 32 of them submitted podcasts. Next week the first essay is due. Collectively these two assignments account for 35% of the overall grade. If these same 12 students neglect to submit an essay next week then judging by previous experience it is likely that these 12 students have already given up on the course.

This week I also got the opportunity to introduce students to “turnitin.com”. Some had heard of it before and were quite concerned. One particular student who had had to use it in high school commented that it made her feel that students were being judged guilty until proven innocent. There is certainly an element of truth in this but I am sure that students know as much about what goes on with regard to plagiarism as I do. Those students who value their education and wouldn’t ever consider plagiarizing know that others do it and that every time a student gets away with it, they are devaluing the work of those students who work really hard on their own assignments and possibly get lower grades than their classmates who are cheating.

The whole exercise of students registering with turnitin.com gives to me a clear indication of how well students are doing on the course. Those students who follow instructions and are on top of their work registered immediately without any difficulty. Many still haven’t registered. Some students have already fallen behind in their work although no grades have officially been allocated yet. There are a core group of students who come to class every day, bring their books, do their homework, fill in their blogs every week. These students will be sure to do well on the course. There are others who have missed the maximum (or more) number of classes before penalties will apply, the same ones have been neglecting to do their blogs and other homework. I fear that when the assignments are due next week ( the podcast and the first draft of the first essay) many will not submit them. So, within the next couple of weeks, students will submit assignments worth 35% of their overall grade. What will students who neglect to submit these assignments do then? Time will tell.

Week 5

This week was when we started working on the first big writing assignment. Although I had brought students’ attention to it a couple of weeks ago, this was the first time that we started reading the text on which the essay would be based. Again I get the distinct impression that students are not really used to having to plan for themselves how best to use their time. When you give them a month to do something, some of them get all panicky worrying about it and everything else they will have to do that month. If they were given smaller tasks to do, night by night they would feel more in control. But when you tell them they have a month to do a larger task and it is their job to decide when and how to do it, then it is all too overpowering. However, I hope they realize that we will be working together on what I would call “building tasks” over the next couple of weeks and if they put lots of effort into those, when the time comes to actually write the essay, they will already have done lots of preparatory work with lots of notes and ideas.

Having assigned the reading of Tyler’s text for homework, I began the class during which we discussed the text for the first time by getting students’ overall impressions. Initially students approached it quite positively because it was only half the length of the text that they had read previously. However when they got down to reading it two of the sections generally found the text to be more difficult that the previous one. They attributed this to vocabularly and length/complexity of sentences. The general impression in the third section was that this text (Tyler’s) was actually easier than the earlier text because it was “more academic”, more carefully structured and direct. Because of the task we were working on, I gave students what I would consider rather challenging questions on the structure of the text and techniques/devices employed by the writer. In other words instead of focusing on what the writer said, we focused more on how he said it. I got the impression that for many students, this was the first time they had done anything like this. To help guide them towards an understanding of “what” the writer was doing, I provided discussion questions under the headings, micro structure and macro structure. As students worked in groups I found that rather than focus on the difficult questions with which they should be grappling they generally wandered off task and discussed other things – in Turkish of course. Oh what to do? In order to ensure everyone was clear on what they ought to be doing, after about 15 minutes we reviewed possible answers to the first three questions. It was clear from answers suggested that despite having read the text, most students had no idea of what the context of the text was – where it was published, what the text was aiming to do and why it was published where it was published. Students had not completed the task by the end of class and so I had to assign its completion for homework.

Week 4

Although I began this week thinking it was going to be a short one, the reality is that for most classes we had our full complement of two meetings. The main focus this week has been on ascertaining how well students have understood the text they read as homework. I myself and still trying to figure out the difficulties that first year students have with reading. To this end I carried out a number of experiments. I got all 3 classes to complete a quiz. The questions were purely checking reading for literal meaning – no inferences or evaluation were required in order to complete it. Many of the answers required just a single word and others just required students to quote from the text. One class was instructed to do the quiz, first as closed book and then after they had done their best with the book closed, they were allowed to redo the quiz as open book. There was one instance of a student getting a higher grade on the closed book version. All quizzes were peer graded and one class I got to redo the quiz even after we had agreed on the right answers. I did this because I found that with the peer grading some students had marked answers correct that were clearly wrong. Consistently, (even when the quiz was redone after grading) the majority of students received a failing grade.

This is of course all very demoralizing for both students and me. In a sense this is exactly what I was expecting to happen and I actually told students this even before they did the quiz. I was hoping that they would prove my expectations wrong. I could avoid giving such quizzes but what would be the value in that? Students and teacher could then convince themselves that texts are being read and understood but what if in reality students don’t understand what they are reading or perhaps worse – they misunderstand what they are reading. At least if you know you don’t know something there’s some hope that you might go off and learn it – or you certainly won’t act as if you know. If one can convince oneself that they understand a text then no further action is required. However, if one admits that one does not understand, one feels obliged to do something but what is it that one should do? Hopefully the skills acquired by students on this course will equip them to deal with texts they don’t fully understand.

From looking at students’ work this week I can identify that one of the major problems is lack of attention to detail and lack of sensitivity to accuracy. Again there were many spelling mistakes and inaccurate quotations although students could have consulted their books for the correct versions. Philosopher or psychologist – does it matter? Does it matter whether one uses Turkish spelling or English spelling? Students seem to think that if their answer is somewhere “in the ballpark” then that’s OK. In the next few months they will have to realize that details are important in academic writing. Students must learn that there is a big difference between saying “this relationship is mediated through computer communication” and “this relationship is mainly mediated through computer communication”.

The second lesson of the week consisted mainly in students creating a synthesized list of points from the text, arranged under headings provided by me. They seem to have worked very well together and have come up with quite a comprehensive list. It may be a bit early in the course to get them synthesizing but it fits in naturally with what we need to do now. Having synthesized information within one text they should better understand the process involved in synthesizing a number of texts later. It was interesting to see how different people can read a text and isolate different points. While I monitored group work I noticed that one student had noted that masturbation offline tends to be solitary whereas masturbation online is a social activity – a point dealt with in the text but one that had not struck me until she expressed it in such blunt terms.

Week 3

I guess one could call the first couple of weeks of a course, “the honeymoon period” and I think students are beginning to sense that that is now over. As always, things run smoothly and appear to be running fine until it’s time to give feedback on work done. For the first lesson this week I gave feedback on the diagnostic essays that students did in the first week of classes. For me there were no surprises. The performance was pretty much similar to that of previous courses and so I got exactly what I was expecting to get. The students however were consistently surprised at the “grade”’ they would have got if I were to grade their essays. Admittedly, I haven’t yet “taught” them very much but all I expect them to do is display what they have already learned – what they learned about writing essays in high school and in particular, in preparation for the TOEFL exam which they had to pass in order to be admitted to Koc University. By asking directly, I found that they had all heard of the concepts of an introduction, a body and a conclusion. They had all also learned of the need for a thesis. Sadly, these elements were missing from a large majority of the essays. Even the concept of paragraphing seemed to have been completely forgotten by many students. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties students had was with answering the question that they were asked. I get the distinct impression (as I always do) that students are not used to answering questions but are rather more used to simply “writing about a topic”. In the past their writing in English has been for the purpose of displaying their command of vocabulary and grammar – how they said things was important and what they said wasn’t given as much attention. Now however they must realize that at university one of the main reasons you will write is to display knowledge. As a communication instructor – yes of course I am very interested in “how” they express themselves, but as I am preparing them for later life at university I will be paying very close attention to what they say. If what they say isn’t worth saying or is inaccurate, then they will be told that, regardless of how well they have expressed it. We are not writing for the sake of writing but in order to convey information.

By the end of class and after reading students blogs I got the sense that students could honestly see the shortcomings in their essays and why they were not deserving of a passing grade. Most of them seem confident that they will do much better in their next assignment and that they will remember to employ the devices and principles that they have already learned as well as incorporate any new guidelines/instructions that I will provide them with. (Here’s hoping).

I am pleased to see that students are being very proactive and that although I haven’t set a deadline for the choice of a topic for the podcasts most students have already chosen a topic. It is great to see that they are not leaving everything until the last minute but are rather planning ahead. There are of course the few – as there always are, who haven’t yet taken any action. They will end up having to choose a topic that they perhaps do not know very much about and will rush through their preparations at the last minute.

On the subject of homework assignments, from reading students’ blogs I get the impression that many don’t really have any sense of how to manage their time. I guess in high school or in ELC homework assignments were for the immediate future ie. Whatever homework you get today is for tomorrow or at the very latest, the day after. However, because last week, I gave students an overview of all the different assignments they will do in the coming month, many of them seem to be overwhelmed. They don’t seem to be used to “multi-tasking” and planning when to do things. Surely they must realize that if one were to calculate all the time that they will spend preparing their podcast, writing their blogs and writing their first formal essay it will all amount to less than 20 hours. This is on average 40 minutes per day. Yes, I know that some of them will leave everything until the last minute and I know that some students can only operate by “burning the midnight oil” but even if they do this it would still be possible to complete the assignments within a single day – admittedly it would be a hard day’s work but it would still be possible. In the past students probably have had others manage their time for them – they only had to worry about planning night by night. However, if they are going to survive at university, they will need to learn to plan their own work schedules more long term. They’ll begin to appreciate this as soon as the mid-terms start. They must learn that a mid-term in one subject should not completely absorb one’s time and energy. While preparing for a mid-term, work on other subjects must continue as normal.

Week 2

At last, classes are settling down in that whoever I had this week is who will be around for the rest of the course. I am sure students get frustrated with all the moves but I doubt they appreciate how much more hassle it is for instructors. The main new features I had to introduce to students this week were of course the completion of a blog and a podcast. This week, after the movement of students around sections, there were considerably more students who knew what a blog and a podcast were. This was somewhat of a relief to me. A couple of students actually were already keeping a blog.

The deadline for creation of the blogs was Friday at 5pm and I am pleased to say that most students met this deadline although of course there were a few who didn't. An instructor can always tell a lot about what's going to happen later in the course by how students perform in the first couple of weeks. Those who have already written in their blogs have tended to write fairly positive comments. The word "fun" has been used quite a lot but I hope students appreciate that attending courses at a university is not all about fun. My own university life was possibly the time when I had most fun but it wasn't during classes. The fun part was what I got up to outside of class. Classes were hard work. It worries me when students have the expectation that classes should be "fun". I have tried to incorporate a certain number of fun elements but overall the course is going to be hard work and the sooner students realise that, the better. Things will start to get tougher as they will realise when they read the next text I assign. When they then have to start writing, they'll realise how even tougher it is.

The First Week

As someone who uses technology quite a lot - at least in relation to other people I know of the same age - I have always considered incorporating technology into my courses. Hitherto I have "used" technology in the administration of courses but have never actually made technology the focus of the course. We have now had one week of classes and I am somewhat surprised by what I learned. Most students claim not to know what a blog or a podcast is. I would have expected them to have already dabbled in these new features of the internet. And so, contrary to what I had expected, the assignments I will be allocating for this course will be the first time that students will actually be doing these things. Things would be a lot easier if they were already familiar with the technology and could focus on the content. However, given that much of what they will do is new for them, it should ensure that their interest is retained and one may be getting them started on a lifelong habit.

I am still somewhat concerned about the assignment which will involve students initiating an online relationship. Again if they were already involved in online relationships, things would be a lot easier. I will have to carefully consider the advice I will offer and in particular I will need to take precautions to ensure that no one gets themselves into serious difficulties.

As there has been a lot of movement of students I cannot claim to have even met them all yet. I am sure that they find the constant movement as frustrating as I do. Once we are all together I will discuss in detail the assignments that they will need to do and elicit how exactly they feel about them. Depending on how worried they are we can modify expectations.

Here's hoping that the next few months will be fruitful for all. I am certainly looking forward to
learning about how my teenage students use the internet and possibly introducing them to some new ways of exploiting it.