Case Study: Pro-D

Scenario

(cc) Photo by BC Gov Photos via Flickr

Lenora is a grade 4 teacher at the Eliza Archie Memorial School, located on the Tsq’escenemc Canim Lake Band reserve. Last year she attended an anti-bullying professional development (pro-d) workshop offered by SD 83 (North Okanagan). There was a lot of valuable information in the session, but Lenora felt it often wasn’t culturally relevant for her community.  When she discussed her experience with peers in the Cradleboard Teaching Project Teacher’s Circle (http://www.cradleboard.org/), others agreed. And many had stories to share about bullying in their band schools.

Indigenous online communities of practice like Cradleboard have really helped Lenora develop her own reflective practice. She’s decided to create an online anti-bullying resource for band teachers – a sort of online pro-d day – that offers support and suggestions from other Aboriginal educators and their allies.

But Lenora’s web access is dial-up only. It can take a really long time to upload and download files. Plus she’s never created a web site before and doesn’t know anything about where one puts a website.

Discussion question

Is a website the way to go for Lenora – why or why not? Post your estimation in weeks in the Pro-D discussion thread. Be sure to explain how you came up your answer.

Response

I think a website or better yet a web presence is the way to go for Lenora.  I am not suggesting that she go the route as http://www.cradleboard.org did with their Dreamweaver built site.  With a few exceptions, I don’t see the majority of people, especially those new to publishing web content, creating sites from scratch using software installed on a computer or needing to know HTML or other types of computer coding.  Many judge their knowledge, or perceived lack, based on the technological mystique that these older methods and processes developed a reputation.  Don’t get me wrong, knowing a little code is always helpful but just not necessary.

Lenora reminds me of the situation many of the teachers I mentor at the K-12 level find themselves.  Often they have little to no experience on creating and managing web sites and if they are comfortable with computers at all it is more likely using programs or services surrounding email, web searching or popular social media services like Facebook.  However, I have good results with motivated novice educators using the tools accessible since the beginning of Web 2.0.

Lenora should frame this experiences as she would for any professional development opportunity regardless of the fact that this particular project involves technology.  The same strategies apply here as for any self directed learning and she has already begun the process by asking for help and input.  Now she needs to follow that up by developing her own opinions through research and continuing to look to the local community, especially fellow educators, and access global support online.  I would support her in determining what it is she wants to communication (content) before deciding on what platform or service she is going to use.  If you pick the service before knowing what you are communicating or how you want to communicate it, the options to do that might not be a supported feature.

As I mentioned earlier, building a site from scratch is not the right choice for Lenora.  There are many cloud based services – WordPress,Blogger, Weebly, Google Sites, Facebook Fan Pages, Google+ Page, Tumblr, Wikispaces – that would be a great starting point.  Although these services can differ greatly from each other (WordPress vs Wikispaces, Weebly vs Tumblr) they all provide the users with a 24/7 anytime anywhere access to their content and for the most part are free. Many of those services were not created to act as a full website but their users have found ways to adapt them of which WordPress is a great example.  She is better off going with a well known platform having been tested and a proven track record or be faced with situations like those using the popular but short lived Posterous service.    For the most part, those premier services should have better help documentation and a greater community from which to draw on for support.

Lenora’s site requirements do not appear to be great and could be formatted using any of the services I mentioned earlier.  A Facebook Fan Page could be a great idea as she most likely only requires a few pages for her site, an ability to display links in an organized fashion, share information (e.g. stories) and develop a community via ‘friends’ and ‘likes’.  I have had success using Weebly with teachers as its strength lays in the professional looking themes, simplified interface, novice to advanced tools, and nice help documentation.

In regards to Lenora’s dial up connection, she could utilize features that don’t require heavy demands on bandwidth like learning how to optimize images, using images sparingly, look at integrating social media services like Twitter, using links to external sites instead of reproducing information, relying less on uploaded document files and instead adding text directly to page.  Once the site structure and the static information is added, the need for activities with would require higher levels of bandwidth should decrease.  For example.  once a page is added to house a discussion forum, it would a relatively low bandwidth activity to moderate.  Again, many services offer email notification of items like dead links, comments awaiting moderation, contact form entries which would save time as the owner would not need to take the time to log onto the web and then the site.  Also, services like WordPress have features which allow users to add blog posts and other content by email and don’t require the owner to even use a browser or log into the site.

I would also caution Lenora to not get caught up with waiting to publish a site until it is perfect.  Often getting the site to look professional,properly structured with minimal content and features is best.  This avoids time lines being unnecessarily expanded which can be frustrating, losing interest in the subject matter or project, or being sidetracked by emerging issues or situations.

Update

After I posted this, I decided to visit Canim Lake Band website at  http://www.canimlakeband.com .  I could see that the site looked to be a CMS and after right-clicking and viewing the source code I saw it was made with Joomla.  If I knew this when writing the first post, I would have added it as the first option for Lenora to pursue.  She could make contact with the Band’s web master and see if a page could be created for her with the idea that she would provide the digital content (images, links, text) to be posted on her behalf.  Lenora could look to enter a mentoring relationship with the web master with the end goal of being able to manage the page (as a registered contributor within the Joomla system) and features such as a discussion forum by herself.  This option would save her from needing to decide on what service to use, where to house it, learn the entire system and create a site from scratch.