Online Services and Collaboration

This class is the first time I am having any experience in a full online curriculum. Between things like Google Docs and collaboration, online storage, and chatting I am thinking of many ways that I can introduce this to my teachers.

Right now, I am kicking around asking a department or level to take their things online. For example, I would like to take the English department (9 teachers total) and have them collaborate on documents like curriculum maps or lesson plans using Google Docs, share ideas using blogs, and sharing all of their files for their classes in an online storage space. This way, all teachers teaching similar classes can easily share their documents.

We are also kicking around some schedule changes at our school. I think this type of collaboration would be great at getting feedback and having people give their input on a subject.

Once I get the teachers involved, I hope they will start using this for the students.

Video Chatting

So, tonight was my first experience using TokBox on the Ning. It worked fine but, in my opinion, it was not convenient for our group. We had a meeting scheduled at the same time as another group and things got mixed up. We were not able to communicate as a group without interfering with others. We ended up typing notes in the live chat area and on the shared Google doc. While I can see the advantages of this meeting method, if it cannot be private then it may not be a solution. Other methods like Skype might need to be explored.

Last Week's Class

I really enjoyed last week's class. That was my first time using an online classroom like that. I have used things like Webex and Go To Meeting as well as video chats using iChat on our school network.

Our school consists of 3 separate locations and we are exploring ways of holding classes and meetings using this type of technology. We have started using Moodle this year for classes and are looking to expand using that technology. As more of our students acquire phones and computers with cameras we may be able to use the WizIQ software.

I was also intrigued by Ning. Creating your own social network is something we have looked at for our alumni department. We have around 17,000 alumni and are working on ways to incorporate new web technologies into our web site so they can re-connect with the school. We are in the process of developing a new web site which will be online within the next 2 weeks. Within that web site we wanted to start using blogs and discussion groups for our alumni but now I am going to research Ning to see if we can incorporate that into our site.

First Post

This is my first post using blogger for my MEIT courses. I have a blog at work that I use for our Technology Learning Community. It is used to post articles, thoughts, and links for members of our school who wish to learn more about technology in education.

My work blog can be found at here.

We have not yet started the learning community for this year so my posts are all from last year.