Greg's EDTEC 700 Blog

This wiki was introduced to a group of the special education leaders to preview and get a feeling for what they will be doing starting in September.  It was the first time working with wikis for many of them.  The main issue was their reluctance to give up personal ownership of material and enter into a collaborative environment.  It still remains to see how it will work.

The accounts will be set using a CSV import of all the people on the committees.  They will all be set to be editors as we want everyone to be able to post to the site and comment on the pages.  there wil be a few administrators who have full control of the site, however this will be limited to myself and 3-4 others.  I normally set the passwords to: changeme initially and then provide instructions for each person to change their password to something that works for them.

Since this an adult audience, each individual is capable of protecting their privacy, student privacy is not an issue for this project.

Working from the county level, the permissions are much less stringent, especially since this is a closed environment.  For any public, social networking page that we post, ie Facebook, we need to notify the communications director so he is aware of what is posted online about the county office.  This wiki site is paid for by the county office, so wiki creation is a direction the office is definitely interested in going for PLCs.

I’m pretty happy how its turned out.  I’ve shared with some of the special education administrators and they are quite pleased with it, so that is a good sign when the customer is happy, although I have to keep in mind they are new to wikis.  It took a few meetings and revisions to truly understand the need and get the wiki set-up to meet that need.  It was very good practice listening to what a customer wants, and then finding and designing a produce that meets those needs – especially when the customer is a novice in technology web 2.0 tools.

Evaluation of this project is going to mainly focus on the usage by participants. Not everyone will be editing, but hopefully everyone will be accessing the site. Pure analytics will be gathered by looking as the usage of each user, how often they log in.  Engagement will be measured by the activity of each group’s designated wiki expert and also by the large group’s ability to create norms and expectations for using the wiki.  Creation of these will be a sign of acceptance and understanding of how the wiki will benefit the group.

The tool I’ve selected is PBWorks.  We have an account already in use at the county office.  Administrators here have some experience using PB Works with other PLCs, so there is some familiarity with it and they already have accounts.

Customizations – I will form folders for each group so their content can be organized.  Each page will be set up ahead of time, so links can be easily formed once a document is uploaded.  The Frontpage will function as a launching point for everyone – all content should be accessible within 1 click off the main page.  All 12 groups will have a link directly from the front page.

Behaviors while using the site:

• Download documents from administrators/organizing committee
• Templates should be easily accessible
• Upload their agendas, notes, and sign-in sheets
• Read each sub group’s materials and leave comments

The users of this wiki are composed of two groups: educators and administrators.  The educators are special education teachers at schools throughout the county.  There are approximately 80 or so teachers who have split themselves into 12 subgroups of different specialities.  The administrators in the county office are helping form the PLCs and provide some structure, so they will be posting information and accessing the wiki to see what each subgroup is doing.

The purpose of the wiki is to have one central location for all members to post content, access content, and comment on content.  Administrators will be posting articles, guidelines, templates, etc. for all to use.  Each subgroup will be posting their agenda, notes, and list of people present for each monthly meeting they have.

This is a fairly new effort on this front – most participants have not used wikis before.  Previously it might have been housed in a static web page that a few people had access to.  Some on the administrative team have used wikis before with other study groups.

I believe there is significant incentive for learning from each other.  My plan is set up the wikis fairly straight forward with strong structure and develop a job aid on how to post and upload documents to deal with the skills/ knowledge portion.  Environment might actually be the biggest performance driver issue.  In my initial meeting with the group, I noted a lot of insecurity with sharing documents.  There were a lot of questions about who could read what, comment on postings, edit each other’s work, etc.  I tried to frame the project in terms of 21st century skills and that the whole group owned the site and content regardless of who uploaded what.

My objectives are:

• The teachers will be able to learn and discuss each of the sub-groups and strategies they are developing
• The teachers will be able to comment and critique their colleagues work in a collaborative manner.
• Administrators will be able track the progress of each group and be able to support their efforts.

I have a few ideas of what to focus my wiki project on.  As a technology coordinator at the county office, I work with other groups to help them collaborate better.  I have a few work related possibilities that may work for a wiki.  My plan is to use PBWorks to design the wiki as it is flexible, easy to create pages, edit and add documents and also lets one comment.  this can all be done withing a closed community.  Any issues with editing can be undone by rolling back to a previous revision – thus the participants will feel free to try out posting

1. Special Education Professional Learning Community – this is my first choice of projects.  The special education community is forming PLCs around a variety of sub-topics.  They have several sub-groups who will be meeting and needing to report back the whole group what they are discussing.  The wiki would be a place for the groups to record their plans, discussions, and comment on other groups pages.
2. English Learner Educator Community – There are a series of strategies that ELL teachers are being trained on.  The ELL coordinator would like a place where teachers can post examples of how they are using these strategies and respond to questions from each other.
3. Science Fair Project Collaboration – as teachers guide students through the science fair process there is a need to share resources, steps of the process, forms required etc.

Here are 3 things about me -supposedly:

1. I have visited all 50 states
2. I am enjoying the EDTEC COMET program (careful here!!)
3. I speak Russian (without Steve’s Google translator!)

I have an offer for anyone who’s interested.  At work we paid for the Pro version and thus I can give up to 50 blogs some of the extra features of Pro – such as themes, adding videos, mobile updating, etc.  If you’re interested, place your blog URL in the comment section of this post.  This should be good until next March and then it depends on if we continue our subscription.

Hello everyone,

Here is a little something about me.  I love to travel and have lived in many places around the country and abroad.  I grew up on the east coast in D.C., college in Maine, since then I’ve worked in Germany, Oakland, Texas, and now San Jose.  I love to travel – our most recent trip was to South Africa for the World Cup. Here you can see the wonderful noise makers we brought back for all of our nephews and nieces!  Needless to say we weren’t the most popular relatives this year.

Other interests include beer brewing, biking, soccer, and now home improvement.

Professionally, I taught middle school science for 8 years.  Since then I’ve worked with NASA education and am now with the Santa Clara County Office of Education as an academic technologist.  I work with the staff here to create online PD and integerate technology into workshops we deliver.