Hello all. I am not exactly sure if we are supposed to be writing only to our group or everyone. At any rate I have done a lot of preliminary work for my project so far. The first step was getting approval from my administration. Their main concern was the safety of what I was doing. They insisted upon using a protected blog so that only approved comments from people outside the group could be posted. I understand that concern. From what I understand the authors of the blog, i.e. my students will still be able to post and comment without having to be approved. I really hope I understood that correctly because approving 120 students posts and comments could become a bit overwhelming.

The next step was drafting the parent letter to go home. This letter explained the purpose of what I was doing with the students, how we would go about setting guidelines and obtained permission for each student to participate and be able to watch the movie and be videotaped. It took quite some time to make sure I had all of my students permission letters in. I invited parents to get in touch with me if they had any questions or concerns and there were only 2 out of 120 that had any questions. That surprised me quite a bit.

I have to wonder if the parents really read the whole letter through and understand exactly what we will be doing. Not that I think what we are doing is questionable but I could see how a parent would worry about safety for example. Yet, I have to say that based upon the school year so far we have a group of parents this year that are not really paying attention to details. We send home weekly progress reports of how the students are doing in every class and the parents just sign that they saw them without taking the time to really look and see what is happening with their child. I have a feeling that later down the line, once we get into this project some more concerns might pop up.

The letter to the parents included a few rules and basic guidelines that we will follow. In addition, a colleague of mine gave me the idea to have students make their own contract for rules and responsibilites with the blog. I am planning on using an outline of a contract and having the class tailor it based upon their discussion. I will guide them in the right direction. By having the students generate their own contract for the guidelines they will have more ownership.

The next step is working on the survey. I have some questions that I have put together but I am wanting some feedback as to whether or not the questions will provide the data I need to answer my big question. I plan to look at these in more detail over the week. I will try and post what I have so that my group may give me some feedback. After looking at several online survey sites I think I am going to use survey monkey. Any thoughts?