Reaching out from the professional sector to educators

I'm working to promote international collaborations between educators. Over the last week I've put up a site where educators can register for what I've been calling the International Educators Collaborative. It's still a little vague what that means because the more I talk to educators about it the more the idea starts shift and come into greater focus. My real purpose is to establish a means for educators to use the web in a somewhat standard way that saves time and provides direct benefits.


I've been part of building a web application that is a sort of online portfolio creation tool we've been calling a "social desktop"and I think it has the potential to fit the needs of a lot of educators. This tool is going to be central in my push for international classroom collaborations once I determine best practices by working with and talking to educators. I'm looking for beta testers so if it's something anyone decides to use I'll be there to help you through the process of understanding what it does and how to use it. The site is:

http://christonium.com/

If you just want to see a simple example of what the site can do you can go to:
http://christonium.com/Jared/ --my education technology site
or
http://christonium.com/music-and-movies/ --a site where I upload music and movie reviews.

If you're mostly interested in online collaborations go to http://www.oratiobrevis.com and fill out the form. The goal with this site is becoming two fold:
1) Connect educators internationally
2) Engage in direct conversations with educators about best practices through blogs and news letters.

I'm working hard to understand the needs of educators, and to try and fill them as completely and generally as possible. I'm very interested in discussing how to best use technology to support the classroom and I also want to make sure that the tools I suggest to people are easy to use while requiring little or no technical knowledge.