Hmm…it would seem that the majority of people here are leaning more towards Lenora not creating a website from scratch. Based on the given scenario, my first impression was the same however after much consideration I would have to say that she should initially begin by creating a community of practice using existing online resources (i.e. social networking sites such as Facebook, Ning; wikis- wikispaces, mediawiki; blogs- WordPress, Blogger) then after developing her skills gradually move towards creating a website using easy-to-use, intuitive online sites like wix, weebly, googlesites, etc. She could also look into learning how to use drupal, dreamweaver, microsoft sharepoint, microsoft expression, etc to create her website (perhaps as a long term goal). Perhaps she could also connect with her IT department to obtain support and figure out whether they could host the site on their server at no cost to her.
I’d recommend though whatever Lenora decides to create she should make sure it links to the Cradleboard site (either under the “Teachers Circle” or “Cradleboarders” sections) so that other teachers can access her online anti-bullying resource through that web portal. Also, given that she has dial-up to contend with the resource she creates should not be too graphics heavy as the page would be very slow to load (in addition to lengthy amounts of time spent uploading and downloading files). This leads me to wonder whether all teachers’ web access at her school is dial-up only or is she using dial-up at home? I mean regardless of whether she’s accessing the Internet from school or home why can’t she upgrade to high-speed internet access? One of the major limiting factors right now is her internet speed and if she can upgrade her access then the only other temporary roadblock would be for her to learn (on her own and through her network of peers) the skills to develop a website (which is what she wants). However, she’ll have to consider and do some research into whether she wants this online space to be simple, or complex. Perhaps, outlining her layout by sketching out all the components she would like to have on her site would be a useful start (before she decides on what type of resource to use to create her site).
Thus, the amount of work that it would take for her to create an online forum on social networking, wikis, blogs, or simple starter websites may be anywhere from 4-6 weeks (or less) depending on her skill level, the amount of time she has to work on this, and the learning curve that may be needed to practice and fully implement her online anti-bullying resource. Additionally, it wouldn’t hurt for her to seek the advice and support of her fellow colleagues about her plans to develop and implement this resource. For example, she may want to connect with her colleagues to find out whether they may be already using some of these websites and then obtain assistance, possibly even working collectively to create (and manage) a group resource. Overall, I think that if this is a team effort and all her colleagues from the Pro-D workshop contributed to the ongoing creation and maintenance of this online anti-bullying resource, not only would her timeframe be cut in half but ultimately it would become a beneficial, learning experience for everyone involved.
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