Link

Purpose:

This web page was designed to be a portal for Melissa ISD and Honey Grove ISD teachers who participated in "Technology Camp for Teachers". Tech Camp was a component of the Technology Applications Readiness Grants for Empowering Texas (TARGET) grant I administered.

Audience:

K-5 teachers from two small rural Texas school districts.

Feedback:

This is the project that brought me to the attention of the Educate the Children Foundation. The directors liked it so much, they contacted me about working with the foundation to help educate teachers.

Reflections:

I based this portal on one I'd designed for Dry Creek School District in Roseville, CA. I wanted a central gathering place for Tech Campers to visit. Here they can find communications tools (Tapped In, Yahoo Groups), articles to read and debate, links to help point them toward useful information and projects, and lots more. The main purpose of the portal is to support teachers post-training and to help them transfer their new knowledge into their classroom practice. We met in cyberspace monthly to discuss their progress on their portfolios (a tech camp graduate requirement, developed over the year after camp). Teachers were also required to view the Concept to Classroom lessons on topics such as multiple intelligences, constructivism, and cooperative learning. We followed up with discussions about these lesson in Yahoo Groups and Tapped In.

All of this, of course, comes from my own learning experiences with iMET. I was anxious to do what I could to duplicate that experience with the teachers I serve.

For the next generation portal, I will add a blog, podcasts, and students/teachers-in-action videos from teachertube.