Welcome to this new site.
You are here because you participated in a seminar sponsored by IED and given by Stephanie Krajicek.
Major issues surrounding most web2.0 tools are hosting and access. Microsoft's Sharepoint Services provide an incredible set of tools to manage both of these issues.
Hosting: These are the pages that have been assembled for my school. Basically, they are a collection of ducument libraries or lists designed for collaboration. Class Agendas are calendars and contact managers. Student Dropboxes are ducument libraries with content approval. Course Documents are document libraries without content approval. Lnks are obvious. Discussions allow you to initiate threaded discussions. Galleries are more or less obvious, and could host podcasts, depending on where your shaprepoint server is located. I added a blog so you could see how this might work.
Your access is highest level, full control. I get alerted whenever changes are made. so I can monitor. As always in the electronic world, you can't break anything that can't be fixed, so look around.
You also have contributor access to all of the teacher sites listed on the parent site, hcteachers.org. You can't see everything with that level of access, which is why I created this site.
When you adopt and install this technology, you have full control over who sees and alters any part of your site. Different pages, different groups, different level of access. Student work submitted can be completely confidential between you and student, or available for the world to view; you make the choice on each page in this site. Changing access levels is usually a matter of seconds.
What sold me on the technology is the dropbox: I almost made my Geometry classes completely paperless this term. We will get there, but somewhat more slowly. The promise of Discussions excited me, as a history and philosophy major, and a certified Great Books program instructor. When I saw how easy it is to set up wikis and blogs, that became icing on the cake.
Holy Cross made the commitment to this technology four years ago. We have had access for two+ years (the first year was somewhat rocky). Some teachers have done a lot. Some have done very little. I'm kind of in the middle of the pack. But, look around.
Other schools have used it more completely than we have. Find links to our consultant and two of his school on the Links page.
Contact me by posting to the blog (comment or post). Or, email addres is dennis.dranchak@holycrosshighschool.org
Dennis Dranchak