only connect - progress - STUDENTS

This page will explore some of the factors that involved the students. Obviously everything ultimately involves them as they are the main focus of both the project and the dissertation, so this page will tend to contain stuff that didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

			time management

This has turned out to be a major issue thus far. While it's not a problem only for Only Connect but part of the many issues surrounding home tuition, it was really beginning to get in the way of the project moving forward so it was felt it needed to be addressed. Basically the students were simply not doing the work set or doing in incredibly slowly, which mad any sort of collaboration we might be thinking of impossible, as well as rather negating the whole point of the project. It was felt that there were two major areas that had to be dealt with, one was pedagogical and is dealt with elsewhere, but the other was organisational and that's what we'll look at here. It seemed to me that one of the problems we were facing was that fact that these students had been out of a school environment for between 6 months and 2 years. Given that they were having only 4 hours tutor contact time a week it seems likely that they would be missing a) the quantity of work they had been used to and b) the discipline of having both a set time and place to do it in. While there is some argument that they will have had experience of being given homework it's a huge leap from having to organise a few hours a week at home to having to organise 5 whole school days at home. My own experience as a freelance worker told me how difficult it was to organise time so I found it easy to empathise with their problems.

Intervention The intervention we tried coincided with the loss of one of the tutors which put me in a position to directly affect the way in which work was delivered to the students. The idea was to apply a more strict structure to the setting and returning of work in an attempt to create a rhythm and perhaps habit of getting work done immediately. Both myself and Mike (the remaining tutor) set specific days of the week on which we would send work. This meant the students could expect to receive a task on Monday - Thursday every week, with Friday free to catch up. In my own task setting I also made the deadline for the work I set the same every week and attempted to provide further structure in the e-mails that contained the work. Here's an example: Here's some work to help you think about facts and opinions. What is it? There's a worksheet attached (PSE_04.doc) called Fact or Opinion? What have I got to do? First you have to decide whether a list of statements are facts or opinions, then you have to write down some facts and opinions of your own. Finally I want you to think about the difference between a fact and a belief and do your best to write me a few words on that. You will find that talking to others about the stuff on this worksheet will help a lot - talk to each other or to anyone at home. How long should I spend on it? You might want to take up to 45 minutes on this one. When do I have to finish it by? I would like this mailed back to me by 4pm Wednesday 28th June. Do I need to look on the web to do this? No, you can do it all off-line. The worksheet is all you need - you can type your answers straight onto the worksheet. To this format I added consistent subject lines to the e-mails - all worksheets for instance used this format: PSE 04 - Worksheet enclosed and all returned work used this format: PSE 04 - Thanks It is hoped that applying this consistency will help with the organisational problems discussed elsewhere on this page. A further issues raised by a student in an interim interview was the idea of 'the school day'. The student pointed out that she tried very hard to keep school work in school hours. Responding to this I made sure that all my deadlines were placed inside a nominal school day. Should we gat as far as actual live chat in the project this will still have to be after 6pm because of line costs, but I felt it was easy to stick to weekdays 9-4 as far as my expectations or them went. It's plain that work would still drift to late nights and weekends but at least I felt I was demonstrating when I felt the work might be done. Evaluation We would hope to find that work is more quickly turned around by the students as a result of this. Questions will be included in the final interviews to see if the students noticed the change and to ask how they felt about it. In future projects there seems to be an argument for creating some sort of web-based work management system. This could be created with a CGI script. It would produce a table that only the specific student and their tutor had access to and would offer cumulative details of work set, completed and marked. This would mean that at any time the student could access a list of of their work and see what was expected of them. This sort of system could be extended to setting as well as tracking work, with links to downloadable documents and web-sites. The downside of taking it that far might be that it makes the system very impersonal. However, it might help solve some of the problems with file and material management outlined below. It works the other way too One of the students presents a different issue. She has worked out her own timetable around the first year of her GCSE work, much of which is provided by her school. In this case there is a conflict between the student's own objectives and that of the project - as there would be in a full roll-out. It is not intended that we would make an intervention here, it it does show that the idea of blanketing a diverse range of students with exactly the same workplan is likely to create some complex and unpredictable situations. While it's not possible to investigate within Only Connect, the problems of time managements could be explored further by comparing the organisational strategies of students who have been out of school for some time with those just out. It may be that the students who have recently left school will find it easier to stay in a working pattern of several hours a day. If they are given such a pattern immediately it might be less likely that they will get used to the idea of only working one or two hours per day as some of the students in this sample do. The use of on-line systems could have a part to play here by very quickly providing activities to keep the momentum up. Like all approaches to provision for students with special needs, this would not work for all, but it seems to me that it is a path worth exploring.

			ICT skillsbase

One of the fundamental requirements for Only Connect to work is that the students involved are capable of handling the computers they have or are given. Personally I've always been deeply suspicious of the notion that children take to computers like ducks to water - they take to the bits that interested them, and managing a filing system doesn't appear to be one of those. In our initial training we had hoped to cover file management in some depth, but there's no doubt that it wasn't enough. What we're dealing with here is the virtual equivalent of any teenager's bedroom, or mine for that matter. We made some attempts to tackle this: Right at the start June produced a booklet of basic instructions, but we were guessing on exactly what areas would need support so this didn't fully hit the mark. As soon as the computers were installed I set up a filing system for each student by putting a folder in 'My Documents' with their name on. In an attempt to make things even easier, I made a further visit in which, where possible, I set the Word default directory to their personal directory, and also set the AOL download directory to that. The idea was that pretty much everything would, by default, end up in that one place on their disc. This certainly seemed to produce an improvement, but really we needed to have had spent a lot more time on the organisation of files, including naming, re-naming and deleting as well as creating new sub-folders. MORE LATER...