Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

Who is using technology in your school?

How do we know who is using technology in a school?

I disburse and evaluate surveys
Note who is coming to my professional development
Keep track of who is filling out technology work orders
Pay attention to who stops me in the hallway
Listen at faculty and core meetings

But now I am administrating the bulk of the faculty network, I can easily see size of the users home directories. 

I was surprised to see some of my low-technology-aptitude teachers had massive (300+ MB) home directories (and this is after deleting cache files, too).  I’ll be targetting them for additional support and training.  Maybe we have some people on the cusp of using technology, who need a little encouragement!

I would encourage other instructional technology folks to check out home directories as a metric to gauge computer use!

On 27 February 2006, Raj Boora inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

What we often find is that the low use people have the most massive storage requirements because they are not able or interested in file management and while some take to training well, the majority unfortunately don’t.

I don’t know how many of our people like that are on the cusp - based on directories alone, but if I were trying to target them, I would look to see who had massive increases in directory size over a short period - that may indicate dumping photos/video and that may be someone who needs just a little push to get going.