Educo User Group and Management Forum

http://blog.dearbornschools.org/webmaster/

quite interesting to follow up on some of the ideas in here for educo...

TS

http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=1903

I've asked for help on the Mahara forums!

TS

Hi everyone,

as Educo has grown over the last few months we (Trevor, Darren) decided that it would be a wise move to bring the management and development of educo more out in to the open. We'd like to see this forum develop in to a place where we decide how Educo is developed and managed for the benefit of our learners. It's worth explaining a little about the funding and the role of the MOE in Educo. The MOE as part of its commitment to the VLN is fully funding moodle/mahara for VLN clusters of schools for 2010/2011. The intention is to build a business case around providing these services to schools as part of a future NEN.

I'd also like to explain a little about the philosophy around why we developed Educo and what it means to be a member of the Educo community. We are deliberately trying to break down the virtual walls that teachers and schools create in online learning. The reason for this is that we believe that teachers teach better (and therefore learners have better opportunities for quality learning) if teachers collaborate together. It's important to distinguish between sharing and collaborating - In my opinion, sharing is good but collaborating is better. In Educo this translates to the site being a place where teachers should be able to see what others are doing and feel free to suggest working together to produce quality courses. We've organised the site by curriculum areas as outlined in the New Curriculum rather than by school to aid this. So to be a member of the Educo community means, for me that you and your school support the vision of teacher and learner collaboration.

What should this forum/group do?

Firstly, this group is for people who are interested in contributing to the development of Educo. Membership of the group is entirely voluntary - please feel free to introduce others to this group - anyone can join (or leave!).

Educo is still young, but growing. As more schools and users come on board we will face challenges. This forum is an open place where we can collectively decide how we respond to these challenges - please use it to:

*Make suggestions on how to improve Educo (answers appreciated!)
*Share things that are working well or not working well

I'd like to introduce Glen Davies at Core Education who takes care of the server-side jobs such as maintenance and upgrades. Glen works with the ePrincipals - requests for work etc to be done on educo will only be actioned when requested by Darren, Vicki Smith/Pete Graham, or I.

That's enough for now. I've set the subscription to this forum to be -just initially- you can change these settings in the course if you wish.

BTW -the course/ forum can be found under home -> administration and is called Educo User Group and Management Forum.

I've just voted for "educo.vln.school.nz" as the best educational website on the TechDay Web Awards.  It's not one of the three "option" choices, so I just put it under "other".  I reckon my 300 students might agree too

Cheers!