opportunity. I have a Ning set up for our school, but haven't yet pushed it
out. It has a few members, but no real content. I have several teachers who
have created Nings for their classrooms and they love it. Your Ning had a
true pedogogical purpose and thus it thrived. I think that is the key to
most technology successes. As Chris Lehmann
<http://www.practicaltheory.org/serendipity/> says, Effective technology is
like oxygen, ubiquitous, necessary and invisible. I will be interested to
learn how the ning continues to function now that your school is back in
session.
-Liz
Liz B Davis
Director of Academic Technology
Belmont Hill School
Belmont, MA
http://www.belmonthill.org
http://www.edtechpower.com
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Fred Bartels <fred_bartels@rcds.rye.ny.us>wrote:
> We had an interesting experience with a forced closure this week related
> to possible H1N1 cases. The closing was initially announced as being for
> two weeks, but after one day being closed, new CDC recommendations allowed
> us to reopen. (All our students with the flu are doing well.)
>
> For most of one day, we all thought we would be closed for two weeks, so
> we started to quickly ramp up possible solutions for keeping courses
> moving forward. You can read more about the day on this ISEnet post.
>
> http://isenet.ning.com/forum/topics/closed-for-two-weeks-due-to
>
> As luck would have it, we had created a school Ning a few days before the
> closure. We viewed it as just an additional communication/collaboration
> tool should we ever happen to be forced to close. The Ning was basically a
> shell with only three members. I sent out an email to faculty about 8 pm
> on the evening of the closure annoucement, letting them know about the
> ning site, and suggesting that for some things -like discussions- the ning
> might be a good optional resource. By 4 pm the following day the Ning site
> had over 200 members, 30 course groups, and a very rapidly developing
> sense of community. To put in slightly differently, we experienced with
> our own little social network, the same explosive growth that happened
> with Facebook and MySpace.
>
> The rapidity with which the ning site developed gives us a lot of
> confidence that we could maintain a strong sense of community during an
> extended closure. The ning is just one of the tools we would use to
> facilitate communication, but it is now very clear to us that it would be
> an important one.
>
> So here is one easy way to prep for a pandemic. Encourage your faculty to
> become members of the Independent School Educators ning
> (http://isenet.ning.com). This will provide a double benefit. Immediately
> it will help them develop their own personal learning networks and it will
> have them comfortable and familiar with Nings should your school ever need
> to use one in an emergency. Oh yeah, and you might want to create your own
> school Ning, and have it ready to go should you ever need it. You never
> know. :-)
>
> Fred
>
> -------------------------
> Fred Bartels
> Head - Computer Department
> Rye Country Day School
> 914-925-4610
>
>
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>
--
Liz Davis
http://www.edtechpower.blogspot.com
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
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