Congratulations on surviving your first week online!

It'll get better and easier all the time. So far the discussions have been "well attended" and 12 of you have managed to post your first journal entries in your private journals. Several people have joined the class late and they will be rushing to catch up, but we will cheer them on also.

For those of you posting on WebCT, don't forget to read responses on the discussion board and in your journals (I haven't posted any of those yet). If you can't see where the responses are, but you see little blue triangles pointing to the right, next to some of your messages on the list, click on the little blue triangle and down will drop the hidden replies.

It generally takes me about a week to get through reading and responding to everyone's journal entries. I'll try to hurry this up for the first one so you can have some feedback before your second one is due, but no guarantees there. We have more than a full class roster this time.

Also if you post something on a discussion or in your journal and the don't see it appear on the list, don't panic. Just click on the "update listing" button to the upper right of the list and your message should magically appear.

Just wanted to add a little sense of power and magic to your second week. :-) Let me know if you are having problems with anything. If we can't work it out with an email or a phone call, I can arrange a meeting with you on campus to have some extra instruction on the computer. I'm glad to do it.

Don't worry. Be happy... You're on a great adventure* and I'm your guide.
(*=see quote below signature)

Judith Weinstein
instructor for ECE180 online
judetheteach@attbi.com
(312) 301-8790 cell/voice mail
----------
"...An adventure is only an
inconvenience, rightly considered.
Adventure is never convenient.
And everything is an adventure,
if you take the right perspective.

So everything is inconvenient?...

Oh yes. That's exactly it! Life
is terribly inconvenient,
which makes it quite entertaining."

from There and Back Again by Pat
Murphy

Welcome to The Exceptional ChildECE 180 Online for Summer 2003!
Orientation Handout

Instructor: Judith Weinstein (aka: teach or judetheteach)
Cell/vm: (312) 301-8790
Email: judetheteach@attbi.com and quizzes@attbi.com (for quizzes only)
Website: http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach (backup website and WebCT links)

Office hours take place in the general chat room for ECE 180 on WebCT. Drop in!
Mondays 9:00-10:00pm, except for the week of the on-campus workshop.

You can contact me anytime, regardless of whether it’s time for office hours or not. If you leave me a voice mail, please speak slowly and clearly so I can decipher your name and phone number.

Keep in touch. I can only tell how you are doing by the work you post or send me and by what you tell me. You aren’t in front of me in class, so I can’t see from your face if you are having a hard time. I am generally a nice person to talk to, and haven’t bitten any students recently. Well, there was that one… But that’s not important here.

WebCT: The usual format for this class is on WebCT, which is limited access. You need a login ID and a password. Your username is your first initial, the first (up to) seven letters of your last name and the last four numbers of your student ID#. It should look something like this: jweinste0481. Your password is your birth date in six digits (MMDDYY, like 010582 for Jan 5, 1982). Please don’t change your password, or the tech people won’t be able to help you easily when you have a problem.

On our WebCT site, we have the course syllabus, “Your Instructor,” course calendar with due dates, Program Observation description, chat room for the instructor’s office hours (fun!), weekly online discussion topics, weekly assignment choices, and the private online journals for each student’s responses to the weekly assignments s/he chooses. WebCT is complicated to use at first. Be patient. Ask questions.

WebCT login address:
http://online.oakton.edu:8900/webct/public/home.pl

Very Necessary Backup Website: All course information is also available on the backup website on Oakton’s servercc, which is freely available. (No excuses, like “I couldn’t get on WebCT…”) Samples of the discussion questions are posted on the alternate discussion board (Discus) and available by link from the backup website. The private journals for assignment responses are only available on WebCT.

Backup website:
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach


Program Observation: You are required to do one 5-hour program observation. This is not negotiable. It is worth 100 points. Do a good job on it! Make sure you include all of the required information and proofread your work!

Every week you will be reading two chapters, taking the chapter quizzes, choosing a weekly assignment alternative to do, writing it up in your private online journal (appears on the discussion board only on your screen and mine), and participating in at least two of the weekly online discussions on WebCT. Weekly assignments, quizzes and discussions are due by midnight Saturday of that week. Contact me if you need an extension, preferably before midnight on Saturday. Email is fine. However, if you are doing this frequently, we will need to have a talk and you may be losing a significant number of points.

Chapter quizzes are available online through the textbook publisher’s website. The link and the instructions are available on WebCT and on the backup website. You must remember to send your quiz results to me at quizzes@attbi.com and to yourself at your email address. Keep the copy you email to yourself all semester. Don’t delete them!

Some previous students (especially A-Oh-Hell users) have had trouble with their browser eating their quiz results and not sending them out at all. The best fix for this we came up with is, before you try to email the results, highlight the page, copy it, and paste it into the body of an email on your own email program, and then send it to me and yourself, rather than relying on the publisher’s email routing. Some people did that all semester to totally avoid the intermittent problem with the voracious quiz-eating monster. I have no control over what the publisher’s email server does, and I can’t fix it once it eats your quiz, no matter how many times you took it over and tried to resend it.

Publisher’s Companion Website:
http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/turnbull5/


Weekly Assignment Choices and Weekly Discussions

Because I don’t use my time and effort lecturing, I have set up a variety of active learning assignments to put you into real life scenarios, mini-research projects, and thought (and emotion) -provoking video versions of reality, to counterbalance the theory you learn from the text. I offer at least two assignment choices each week. I offer bonus points for some choices that I feel are more valuable, but less convenient to students, such as some very excellent videos we have in IMS, and an on-campus physical disabilities simulation workshop I run every semester.

Your online private journal can only be accessed by you and the instructor. This is a dialog journal, where you post a 1-2 page response to an assignment, and then I give feedback and a grade, and often other ideas for you to consider. Sometimes there is a longer conversation that takes place about a particular assignment, depending on your interest and enthusiasm. Your journal resides on the WebCT discussion board.

I approach the weekly discussions the same way. I post scenarios gleaned from my own or my colleagues’ experiences, or from the current news reports. Most of these scenarios are true events, although some of them are composites of several similar happenings. You post a total of 4 times each week (2 major posts and two replies to other students). In order to get credit for the discussions, you are required first to answer my scenario in detail in two different discussion topics. Then you read what other students have written, and choose at least one other student’s post to reply to in each of two topics.

Proofread your work! When you post your work on the discussion board or in your private journal, remember that this is a “paper” you are turning in. That means, don’t write it like you’re instant messaging your friends. I expect correct spelling and grammar. This is, after all, a teacher (or social worker) training course, and you are supposed to be professionals. (See the Grading Guide for Papers at the end of the syllabus to see how I grade. I’m tough.)

This Semester’s Weekly Assignment Choices:
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach/assignonlinesum03.html

Week 1 topics on alternate discussion board: http://lego.oakton.edu/discus/messages/26/26.html
(See WebCT discussion board for full list of topics for summer semester.)


And last, but not least… I cannot emphasize this enough…
KEEP A COPY OF ALL OF YOUR WORK.
KEEP A COPY OF ALL OF YOUR QUIZZES.
KEEP THEM ALL SEMESTER.

You should know that, according to Murphy’s Law, whatever you don’t keep is what will get lost when the server crashes or when my email goes ka-blooey. It’s your responsibility to have a copy of your work if I ask for it.


Don’t forget to have some fun with this. Enjoy your experiences. You will be getting back to reality soon enough.

WebCT is up and running

Welcome, ECE 180 online students.

Congratulations on reading instructions well enough to send me your email
addresses. There should be about 8 more students joining the list when they
send me theirs. I have loaded all of you into WebCT. You can try logging on
WebCT and see if you get in okay to the site.
http://online.oakton.edu:8900/webct/public/home.pl

If for some reason you can't, I have set up an alternate (non-WebCT) site at
http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach
Click on the link that says "backup website" at the bottom of the page. Use
that if WebCT isn't working for you, and let me know if there is a problem. We
officially start Monday, but you can start sooner if you want to.

Your WebCT login ID is your first initial and the first (up to) seven letters
of your last name and the last four numbers of your ID# (that ID looks
something like this B1234567). Your password is your birthday (mmddyy) which
would be 011203 if you were born Jan 12, 2003.

I hope to see all of you at the orientation on Monday night. Please make every
effort to be there. It's important and will help you get started well on WebCT.

More info will be coming your way, so make sure you check your email every day.

Judith Weinstein
instructor for ECE180 online
judetheteach@attbi.com
(312) 301-8790 cell/voice mail

Congratulations on surviving your first week online. It'll get better and
easier all the time.

For those of you posting on WebCT, don't forget to read responses on the
discussion board and in your journals (I haven't possted any of those yet). If
you can't see where the responses are, but you see little blue triangles
pointing to the right, next to some of your messages on the list, click on the
little blue triangle and down will drop the hidden replies.

Also if you post something and the don't see it appear on the list, don't
panic. Just look for the "update listing" button to the upper right of the
list and your message should magically appear.

Just wanted to add a little sense of pwer and magic to your second week. :-)
Let me know if you hare having problems with anything. If we can't work it out
with an email or a phone call, I can arrange a meeting with you on campus to
have some extra instruction on the computer. I'm glad to do it. I've already
met with a couple of students last Saturday.

Don't worry. Be happy... You're on a great adventure* and I'm your guide.
(*=see quote below signature)

Judith Weinstein
instructor for ECE180 online
judetheteach@attbi.com
(312) 301-8790 cell/voice mail
----------
"...An adventure is only an
inconvenience, rightly considered.
Adventure is never convenient.
And everything is an adventure,
if you take the right perspective.

So everything is inconvenient?...

Oh yes. That's exactly it! Life
is terribly inconvenient,
which makes it quite entertaining."

from There and Back Again by Pat
Murphy

More clarification for the first week assignments

Okay, let's see if I can make this simpler.

The first week all you have due is to read chapter 1, take the ch 1 quiz online, and to introduce yourself on the discussion board.

After this week, you will have more due. Each week you will be reading one or two chapters, taking the quizzes, doing an assignment alternative and writing it up in your private online journal, and participating in the weekly online discussion.

The two weeks that are exceptions to this norm are the weeks your observation reports are due. On those weeks, you will have no other reading or work to do.

You can get a quick look at the calendar of due dates and at the weekly assignment choices without even having to figure out how to use WebCT. You can go to the backup website and click on the links for the calendar and the weekly assignment choices. Here is the web address for the backup website: http://servercc.oakton.edu/~teach/ECE180online.html

I hope you won't have problems with this. This is the easy part, although I admit it can be kind of confusing at first. Just go to the site and click on the links at the bottom of the page, and read the instructions for each thing.

For those of you confused about your WebCT login, your username is you first initial and the first (up to) seven letters of your last name and the last four numbers of your Oakton ID. If your name was John Smithfield and your ID# was B1234567, your username would be jsmithfi4567. Your password is you birthdate all in two digit numbers (mmddyy). If you were born today your password would be 011303 (for Jan 13 2003). Still confused? Send me your birthdate (including the year) and I'll send you back your specific username and password. I already have your Oakton ID#s, but not your birthdates.

Let me know if you still can't figure it out. On Thursday at the orientation, we will be going over WebCT (which is more complicated) and I will also show you the backup website and go over the course requirements. Make sure you are there!