What I have been doing for the last two weeks

For the last two weeks, I have been involved in the roll-out of a new electronic Teacher Community for AP Biology.  Somehow or other (really due to my inability to say no to anything related to my favorite course), I was asked to be the moderator of the space.  Since launching last week, the Teacher Community has amassed ~1500 teachers and is putting on a few hundred more per day.

Previously, we all interfaced through an e-mail based “Electronic Discussion Group” (or EDG), but that is soon to go the way of the trilobite, with the Teacher Community taking its place.  The Teacher Community is styled in a message-board structure, with the ability to converse and easily access archived conversations.  Additionally, there is a resource library area, where any member can post resources of all kinds for the community to access.  

All in all, I think the whole thing represents a big step forward for how teachers can communicate and collaborate with each other, and I’m pretty proud to be a part of it.

I have started to make a series of informative screencasts to help folks as they navigate over.  If you are not a relevant party, but would like to get a view of the inside of the place, you might want to check them out, too.

For To Use The Twitter Well in Education

Here is the log of our first #APBio twitter chat.  It goes from the bottom up.  I thought it went well.  So did everyone else, since it’s already a go for next week (topic:  ”Adding inquiry to labs”) 

We’ll be running these for the foreseeable future, every monday night 8-9pm EST.  Join us if you are the target demo.

Look What I Built!

A few years back, I fooled around with running blogs (plural) for my AP Biology class.  It was something that I eventually abandoned, as I felt the amount of effort needed to monitor individual blogs for my students was too much, and the payoff was too little for the students.

A few years on, I’ve decided to give it another shot.  So I built a class blog (which you can access by clicking the link at top of this post).  One blog, to which all students will be able to access and be expected to contribute.  Maybe this is the difference that is necessary, I don’t know.  

Anyway, a bit of Wordpressery and the thing is up and running.  Not too much there yet, but it’s at the point where I will start to invite students the chance to put their summer journal assignments on the thing, before I make them start posting with the beginning of the year.

Less than 24 hours in to the summer, and already, thoughts turn toward next year.  Such is the teaching life.