Ning or other web 2.0 for faculty collaboration at your site/district

I am curious if anyone has used ning.com or other web 2.0 to build collaboration in your building/district/site. I teach in a 5-8th building, the teachers are very isolated between wings and floors, as well we have four different lunch hours. I have been at this building 3 years and there are still teachers I don't recognize! I think ning would be an awesome way to foster more communication at our building. I am hoping to use ning this fall. I'm thinking online faculty meetings, curriculum sharing discussions, grade level topics, lesson sharing.

I am wondering if anyone has had success using social networking at your site and what worked/ didn't work.
Thanks

Tags: Networking, Social, buildings, districts, for, teachers

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Permalink Reply by Sharon Betts on June 26, 2007 at 8:25pm

I am mentoring a teacher who is finishing his adminstrative certification. His final project is to setup a communication / collaboration tool for his school (7-8). His present direction is web 2.0 tools. I also have moved our teacher PD to a social platform very successfully. Let me know if that might be of interest.

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Permalink Reply by Teacher K on June 27, 2007 at 8:52am

In my district, I have created a Moodle class for teachers who are using the online classroom management system to share their lessons, methods, wild schemes and to ask for help. It has taken a lot of encouragement, but a few are now communicating with other Moodling teachers across the district quite regularly.

The tech teachers in the district have also used a combination of wikis and Google docs to prepare for planning days and to work on curriculum. We only see each other 4 days a year, so it is great to be able to communicate online. I think it helps us feel a little less isolated since there aren't other teachers in our buildings who are teaching the same curriculum.

These are general 2.0 examples. I don't currently have social networking examples. I know that someone in the district is looking into using Ning as a base for technology professional development, but it hasn't been implemented yet.

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Permalink Reply by Greg Noack on June 27, 2007 at 9:17am

Thanks for the ideas! I have tried to use moodle, but to no success. It doesn't seem intuitive to me. Ning seems so much easier, especially for teachers who aren't techy. I do want to look into moodle again.

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Permalink Reply by Deb on June 29, 2007 at 5:47pm

I agree Greg. We just got a moodle account and I'm not finding it particiularly easy to navigate. I just purchased a couple of books through Amazon so I am going to try to sort it out this summer.