Looking through the 12 microblogging tools it raises a whole wave of opportunities that could be open for schools. Co-op would be an ideal solution to a communication problem at my current school. There was a previous noticeboard system that operated successfully a few years ago that worked to keep teachers informed on what was going on in the school. When the ACT department of education changed their systems and got rid of this tool, we needed to find a new solution to this issue.
The replacement for this system has been to send a multitude of whole school emails on a daily basis. The problem with this system is that the number of emails can become overwhelming. Also, when responses are made to these whole school messages, they are often not returned as “reply all”. This means that people are left out of the loop and there is the constant feeling of having to catch up to what is going on. A web 2.0 solution where the discussion and answers can be followed and tracked means communication and decision making can be made clearer.
An additional bonus to a new web 2.0 tool for this problem would be to enable a forum for sharing ideas and tools in order to make the work environment more collaborative.
However, before considering introducing this tool to the staff as a solution, it is necessary to examine the obstacles. We are operating in an environment with varying levels of digital literacy where there is constant discussion about the level of technology that should be taught and implemented in students learning. With a high workload already in place, the introduction of yet another task that needs to be completed (contributing, checking, responding to the co-op) could possibly result in an immediate opposition from a number of staff who are already feeling overworked.
A possible way around the opposition from the teaching staff could be a slow implementation of the tool with interested staff. Therefore, this small scale introduction would need to be successful in order to generate positive word of mouth to encourage other staff to want to take part in the project.
However, the problem this tool would solve is a whole school problem and would be difficult to trial a solution to it without including the whole staff. Therefore, in the beginning it would need to be trialled with a specialist group that would use the tool on a specific project that could be free standing from the rest of the staff.
This is an exciting prospect that could solve the nagging communication problem that has been wearing away at the staff for a number of years. Getting this project off the ground will be the real challenge.....
OLJ activity - Delicious
As a teacher-librarian at an IBO Primary Years Programme (PYP) school, I spend a large amount of my administration time looking for up to date resources to support the teaching of our constantly evolving programme of inquiry. The current function on our opac that enables websites to be listed is not one which has proven useful or friendly for use in the classroom. Delicious offers an alternative way to save and share these resources.
Initially I have been using my delicious account as a way to find resources that will support learning at my school. Simply searching the term ‘pyp’ opens up a vast range of resources that have proven much more useful than an identical google search. While google simply searches for the term ‘pyp’, the resources on delicious are those that have been deemed useful by someone to be associated with the program.
Delcious is a simple to use tool that would be beneficial to use as a tool to share resources within a school community. The context of a PYP school means that resources cannot simply be rehashed each year, but due to the changing nature of the program, the resources that are required also change. As a result, it is a program that is worked on by a collaborative team of teachers throughout the school. A central tool such as Delicious would be an effective way to collect and share relevant resources and one which I hope to share and implement at a whole school level.
OLJ activity - RSS
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a way to receive a variety of news sources without visiting their website using a RSS feed reader (Attitude Group Ltd, n.d.).
An example of a primary school that has harnessed the RSS feed is http://rosalie.wa.edu.au/news-feed/. This school uses the feed as a way to share information with their school community. Their intention is that this is an easy way for parents to find out headline news about their school which can fit into their busy schedule (Murley, 2009). They also have a separate feed where you can subscribe simply to the school calendar so you are aware of events.
At a larger scale, school systems have started to use RSS feeds to provide information to their students/parents. http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/rss-feeds is an example of a school system that has set up several RSS feeds for purposes such as events, alerts and news. This enables parents to subscribe to the individual feeds that they are interested in and stay up to date with that particular source of information.
There are 3 ways RSS could be used at my school.
With teachers: An RSS feed, in addition to our delicious account would be an ideal way to use an rss feed within my school. This would be an efficient way to share new tags or links from delicious.
With students: Another way rss could be used within a school environment would be to share the blog posts of various classes. It has become popular for classes, or in some cases individual students, to start their own blog where they record and reflect on their learning. In order to gain the most advantage from these entries it would be ideal for these blogs to be share at a year/whole school level. This would give the blogging tool more of a chance to be used as a tool of collaboration as it would raise the viewership of the content and increase the chances of interaction.
Communcication with parents: Like the examples above, using an rss feed could be an efficient way for us to communicate with our school community. Parents often do not read the school newsletter which contains a range of news and information on upcoming events at school. Using the headline approach may be a more effective way to deliver this information.
Attitude Group Ltd. (n.d) What is RSS? Retrieved at: http://www.whatisrss.com/
Murley, D. (2009). The power of RSS Feeds. Law Library Journal, 101(1), 127-135. Retrieved from http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Publications/llj/LLJ-Archives/Vol-101/pub_llj_v101n01/2009-08.pdf
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