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Area of Inquiry

The area of inquiry for this project is written communications between teacher and student. The goal was to improve communications between student and teacher so that longer-term asynchronous communications may be carried on. I currently use writing prompts with my math students to get a better idea about how they are doing in class and how they view themselves as learners in the class. I did have them create a weekly report, turned in every class period, but the comments and questions were not as in-depth as I would have liked, and I didn't have an easy way to check back on what the students had written a couple of months ago.

My goal was to learn to use a web interface and databases so that I could keep track of the communications. Requirements were that it had to be secure and private. Students shouldn't be able to see other students writings, nor should people be able to download the database by knowing the name of it. Furthermore, people who legitimately have access to the entire web should not be able to access the database. I decided against using our main school server because all publishers had read-only access to the entire web. Furthermore, even it were acceptable for the databases to be open to those people, our server was not set up to easily keep people from opening a file in the main web area. As a result, I decided to move to databases to another server.

Researching the various options took much more time than I anticipated as there are a plethora of options out there. The options I looked at seriously for doing this project were:

1. Microsoft FrontPage^® discussion groups.
2. Microsoft FrontPage^® database interface.
3. AspForums Forum software. (www.aspforums.com)
4. Manila (http://manila.userland.com/)
5. Web Crossing (www.webcrossing.com )
6. GenericDB ASP database interface (www.genericDB.com)

I've written short reviews of each package on the software review page.

I've made two different kinds of constructions that were successful, and I tested several others that I decided not to use. Below are the ones that I actually ended up using with my students.

Discussion Groups

I used FrontPage to set up twelve discussion groups so that Amy Murphy and I could have our students collaborate and we could monitor and communicate with them. I learned a tremendous amount about how to get discussion groups to coexist peacefully in a web. After the groups were running and I had tested them, I made a change and accidentally “broke” the discussion groups for a day. The problem was that Amy's class had done a lot of writing and the information didn't post! I apologized to her students and, like Bill Clinton, I felt their pain because it was my fault.

I had tested the change and everything worked. After I found it broken, I realized I had tested using my administrator account but the student accounts didn't have access to the virtual directory. I now always do a double-check using a student account.

This is a very good example of why I prefer to avoid the tech department in an organization and do the work myself. When something goes wrong, I have no one to blame for my suffering. I caused it; I suffer; I fix it as soon as I can. When tech support makes a mistake when acting on a request of mine, I become very frustrated because they caused it; I suffer–they don't; they fix it when they get around to it. In the meantime I'm stuck and suffering and my lesson is going down the tubes with no fallback plan.

You can view the original discussion groups Amy and I set up but they are password protected.  If you need the username and password and you are a member of  OMAET, write me and I will give you one for access.

Forms and Databases

I then got serious about learning about forms and databases. I had done simple forms in the past, but I had always sent the information as an email or to a comma-delimited text (CSV) file. The CSV file I would import into Excel^® spreadsheet. If I were to continue a conversation throughout a year, I would really need to be able to put the information into a database file. Access^® was a logical choice because FrontPage integrates with it quite well.

The hyperlinks below lead to the actual pages used for the students, although the information is no longer captured.

For the first pass, I asked the students to evaluate themselves for their progress report in the middle of the first quarter. Still not really understanding the process, I sent the information to a CSV file, then imported it into a database for the first database. Here, I just read what they wrote.

For the second pass, I asked the students to evaluate themselves for their report cards. New things I did that I hadn't known how to do before were:

• sent the information to a database, but it was a separate database file;
• put in a column for my comments in the table;
• added a form in the database file for input and wrote responses to the students
• Opened Word^® and did a merge of the database file so that each student received a comments for her parents that showed what she wrote as well as my response.

For the third pass, I had the students evaluate themselves and their partners for their first partner quiz. By this time, I had combined the two other databases, but I wasn't quite sure how to send the information to the same database, so it went to a second database and merged later into the original. This time, I figured out how to do a custom report.

For the latest pass, I figured out how to send the information to a separate table within the same database, and used that for students to make their comments.

Click the picture on the right to see a larger version of how the various tables are are arranged within the database.

With that confidence, I then decided to go further. I needed to survey the students for information for my paper in ED633. A web-based survey with the information going to a database seemed the logical choice. For this survey, I learned several new things about forms, as well as how to send the information to a database. In particular, I learned how to group controls so that only one option could be selected and validate the forms. Although I didn't actually use an input mask in the final form, I did play around with it. Click the image on the right to open the survey in the browser.

I learned enough about databases and the web doing this that I converted my list of owners and directories from an Excel spreadsheet to a database and built the search pages for it so people could see which directories they owned. Although the final version resides in the school's protected Intranet site, the very plain draft is viewable at http://staff.asij.ac.jp/dfincher/webowners. Click the figure on the left to see the dependency tables created to maintain the structure.

Next Steps

I did not get as far as I intend to with this project, but I will keep working on it as progress is steady, if slow. The goal is to be able to have an on-line area where I can converse with individual students, and they can only see their areas, but I can see all of the students and reply to all of them at once.

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