Developing an Online Teacher Community
Posted by Sean Gardinier on December 12th, 2007
CorreiaTeachers.com was created after discussions with many teachers over the 2006-2007 school year. I hope the site will be a practical solution to increasing school communication, reduce meetings, and facilitate stronger collaboration while bringing the teaching staff to the 21st century of communication technology.
CorreiaTeachers.com was registered on June 7, 2007 and pointed to my server (though we could potentially move the database at anytime). The software, phpBB3 RC1, was installed on June 9th. phpBB is open source topic forum software that is completely customizable to meet the needs as our community grows.
RC7 (release candidate) is phpBB3’s latest version and though I have upgraded a few times since June, I’ve been waiting for the official stable release to come out.
The greatest challenge in setting up an Online Teacher Community is not technical. In fact, that’s the easiest part. The greatest challenge lies in encouraging teachers to utilize it. Though prior to its development, my discussions with teacher’s showed great enthusiasm for the potential. Even at its release, after a few days of development, teachers and administrators alike were excited about the potential.
For those of you who are teachers or work at a school, you know that it takes more than throwing the world online to encourage teachers and administrators to give the new tool a whirl.
After the first professional development giving the teachers a tutorial of phpBB3, I repeatedly heard, “It’s just one more thing I have to check.” As our administrators and teacher leaders increasingly use the site for communication, I still hear it.
It is not that teachers are resistant to change, they deal with change every minute throughout the school year, I think teachers know technology has a learning curve and they know it takes time. Time is short for teachers whose plate is always overflowing. Unfortunately, the daily stress and overwhelming responsibility that comes with teaching often shades the light of opportunity.
Leadership is necessary in this environment and my administration has recently taken an active role. Actually, I’m proud of them! I know some school administrations are reluctant to require their staff uses email.
More to come on the community!