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Lately, free slots in the computer lab booking calendars have become almost as rare as sightings of Pacific Northwest Tree Octopi… (and just in case you’re wondering what kind of mushrooms I’ve been eating, check out Fred’s post). While it’s great that costly resources are being put to good use, it’s probably best if we also use these resources well. Currently, I’m not sure that’s what’s happening all the time.
There seems to be a bit of a “tragedy of the commons” going on - people are generally aware that labs are a scarce resource, so some are engaging in pre-emptive bookings out of fear that others will get there before them and block book in a major way. As a consequence, students are sometimes brought to labs for lessons that have not been thoroughly thought out in advance, possibly before they are actually ready to use the computers for whatever project they’re working on. We probably need to address this culture of block booking “just-in-case”…
We (that is, some of the IT teachers) will be developing guidelines for booking labs, with both ‘what-to-do’s and ‘what-not-to-do’s, and also formulating best practices for effective use of computer lab time. We would like to work with departments to gather ideas and offer support on this, thus hopefully reducing wasted time, and in some cases also improving the quality of time spent in the labs. An additional benefit is thus to further the subject-specific learning outcomes as well. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be approaching various departments to gather feedback on this.
Here’s a slideshow I put together to introduce some of the ideas during HS Faculty meeting this morning:
As indicated in the slideshow, one way to improve the quality of web research is to offer scaffolding in the form of a customized search engine. With a compiled list of pre-screened sites you’d like your students to use for information gathering, you can set up a customized search engine in minutes and then simply send your students to that page to do their search. If you have a blog or a class site on our web portal, you can also embed the search engine there (just ask one of you friendly neighborhood IT teachers for help ). You will then have peace of mind, knowing that students will only find relevant material for the topic you’re studying and won’t be wasting time wading through irrelevant material.Here’s an example of a customized Google co-op search engine I put together just for this session. It only searches content in this blog, as well as Mark Dilworth’s and Darren Murphy’s blogs. Try searching for terms such as “laptop”, “RSS” or “Curriculum”:
Finally, here’s a slideshow showing how to set up a customized Google search engine:
