Blog it up!
Hi Cobe and Scott:
A couple of issues/needs came up out of our BWP class today that I think the village could help with quickly (tout suite, Janelle)
1. Is there is a mighty need for a blog space for mentoring. Could we put a blog up for that--I would like to password protect it so teachers can present their issues in privacy and typepad.com offers a password protected blog space. I use it with my courses now, and I get in through CDE. If we needed to use something like this, and needed to pay for a membership, we have enough money now (if it's a reasonable cost) to pay for this. I just feel strongly that teachers need to be able to speak about their needs, issues, and concerns freely without worrying about that information getting "out there."
Administratively, we're going to put out a call for people who might want to "mentor" for free or for a tiny stipend. I have to run all this by Janelle and get her input, but that's what we were discussing today. There were some really troublesome issues teachers are dealing with--overcrowded classes, an administrator dumping all the problem students on the "good" teacher, thus offering her nothing in the way of peer support within the class; a teacher, six weeks into school starting finding out that she may not be teaching departmentalized but may shift to all subjects self contained--six weeks into school, etc. Lots of ELL issues-
Graphic/Tech wise--I was thinking of all kinds of titles and spaces for this place?
Gym Building: Slogan--Build your mentor/mentee muscles at the Mighty Mentee Gymnasium (ok, that's a bit of a stretch, but a thought.
Dance Studio--Minds in Motion: Mentors and Mentees problem solve classroom issues.
Also, just to be able to use our other spaces, would it be hard to take the page design that are in the various other spaces and put them on a blog so that those spaces could be interactive? That would make them "inhabitable" to the citizens very quickly, while Cobe designs the interior spaces and Cobe and Scott work through tech solutions?
Anyway, what do you guys think? Could we get something simple up quick? Is there an exhiting space we can put Mighty Mentors in (maybe in a School House room (grid) temporarily until designs could be done?
Scott, did you watch Cobe's movie? I had to play it 3 times today--it just was the perfect venue to have us feel the development of the village and the movie is perfect. Cobe, we've never talked about it, but Mayberry was exactly the prototype village I had in mind as well!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is really a surprising connection--and it's bc of the friendliness of the people and the way they interacted as well as the design features.
I sort of had a auditory image of some of the places in Lake Wobegone--like the Chatterbox Cafe'. But, my strongest image was of Mayberry!!!!!!
Cobe, I'm going to send you an invite to the Leadership Blog. I'm going to copy this on the blog so the leaders can see our discussion and we have a record of it. You can respond via e-mail rather than the blog if you want. Whatever works best for you, but I just want to share what we're thinking with the other leaders as well.
Jeannine Hirtle
Arlington, Texas 76001
A couple of issues/needs came up out of our BWP class today that I think the village could help with quickly (tout suite, Janelle)
1. Is there is a mighty need for a blog space for mentoring. Could we put a blog up for that--I would like to password protect it so teachers can present their issues in privacy and typepad.com offers a password protected blog space. I use it with my courses now, and I get in through CDE. If we needed to use something like this, and needed to pay for a membership, we have enough money now (if it's a reasonable cost) to pay for this. I just feel strongly that teachers need to be able to speak about their needs, issues, and concerns freely without worrying about that information getting "out there."
Administratively, we're going to put out a call for people who might want to "mentor" for free or for a tiny stipend. I have to run all this by Janelle and get her input, but that's what we were discussing today. There were some really troublesome issues teachers are dealing with--overcrowded classes, an administrator dumping all the problem students on the "good" teacher, thus offering her nothing in the way of peer support within the class; a teacher, six weeks into school starting finding out that she may not be teaching departmentalized but may shift to all subjects self contained--six weeks into school, etc. Lots of ELL issues-
Graphic/Tech wise--I was thinking of all kinds of titles and spaces for this place?
Gym Building: Slogan--Build your mentor/mentee muscles at the Mighty Mentee Gymnasium (ok, that's a bit of a stretch, but a thought.
Dance Studio--Minds in Motion: Mentors and Mentees problem solve classroom issues.
Also, just to be able to use our other spaces, would it be hard to take the page design that are in the various other spaces and put them on a blog so that those spaces could be interactive? That would make them "inhabitable" to the citizens very quickly, while Cobe designs the interior spaces and Cobe and Scott work through tech solutions?
Anyway, what do you guys think? Could we get something simple up quick? Is there an exhiting space we can put Mighty Mentors in (maybe in a School House room (grid) temporarily until designs could be done?
Scott, did you watch Cobe's movie? I had to play it 3 times today--it just was the perfect venue to have us feel the development of the village and the movie is perfect. Cobe, we've never talked about it, but Mayberry was exactly the prototype village I had in mind as well!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is really a surprising connection--and it's bc of the friendliness of the people and the way they interacted as well as the design features.
I sort of had a auditory image of some of the places in Lake Wobegone--like the Chatterbox Cafe'. But, my strongest image was of Mayberry!!!!!!
Cobe, I'm going to send you an invite to the Leadership Blog. I'm going to copy this on the blog so the leaders can see our discussion and we have a record of it. You can respond via e-mail rather than the blog if you want. Whatever works best for you, but I just want to share what we're thinking with the other leaders as well.
Jeannine Hirtle
Arlington, Texas 76001
posted by Scott S. Floyd @ 8:50 PM
3 Comments:
At 9/09/2006 10:10 PM,
Scott S. Floyd said…
Yes, I did see Cobe's movie. I added some code to it so it could be played on the BWP blog. It is great!
I can understand the need for mentoring, but do we want it to get into topics other than literacy issues? It doesn't matter to me. I am just afraid of where it could lead if bad advice (or good advice that goes poorly) is given out on matters outside of our realm as a literacy program. I agree, though, that teachers need a place to vent and get advice.
I am going to look into WordPress. It is a free open source software program that is very popular. I need to check the password protection aspect of it. I assume you mean that you want a password just to go in to read it as well as post or comment on it. Correct? WordPress would give us a lot of leeway in creating as many blogs as we want for our site without having to use Blogger every time. I am not an expert with WordPress by any means, but I will be using it for the wetlands project I am working on. I should get some great experience with it there soon enough.
At 9/09/2006 10:44 PM,
Scott S. Floyd said…
I just checked and WordPress does support password protection on articles posted. This might be the solution so that literacy-based mentor discussions will be visible to all interested parties and those needing more privacy could be password protected. I still need to look into it more, but I wanted to keep you up-to-date.
At 9/10/2006 4:43 PM,
Scott S. Floyd said…
Those are excellent points and I think we need to set a policy and post it on the site, that we only deal with literacy issues and offer them as possible suggestions--not concrete answers. Also we do not discuss building or district policy.
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