Category Archives: Assignment 3

SharePoint has been the thorn in my side for the last couple of days.  I have spent a copious amount of time trying to get my vision into reality on my SharePoint website and it is driving me crazy!  As the official way to do all things in my school district, I am trying to tow the party line and give it a fair shot.  In all honesty, I do not have a lot of experience with building websites so I am not really sure if it is me or if it is SharePoint.

The first thing that I tried to do was to add a Pearltree of websites that explain what Inquiry Based Learning is.  In didn’t think that this worked, even though on my screen in did because I had someone else test it out yesterday and my Pearltree didn’t up.  Thankfully when Jenny tried today it worked on her computer…perhaps I did something right.

The second thing that I tried to do was put a “shelf” from Shelfari up with 5 books that were recommended reading.  Somehow, only one book would transfer onto my shelf…weird.  So I changed from the shelf widget to a widget that just produced a list with pictures of the books.  Not quite what I was going for aesthetically but it is there in some form.  So, I guess I did something sort of right.

Then I tried to embed a YouTube video onto a page and again, it showed and even played on my editing page but when I went to publish…gone, vanished into thin air.  So here is the video I tried to embed.

I actually would have liked to put another one or two up or perhaps even a video of Inquiry Based Learning in progress as out school but will have to figure this out still…this step, fail!

I have also added a blog page to the inquiry portion of my webpage.  I hope that this will be a way to share ideas, input, feedback, links, or just a way to connect about this topic first at a school based level before I look to connecting at a district or broader level.  Since I am not at the school every day, I would like this to be a way for people to contact me if they have a question about a project or an idea or whatever others would like to post.  The blog is up and I have posted a few things.  The next step is to figure out how to give other people permission to post and I do not know how to do that.

The next step for me is once school is back in session, to talk to the tech. people and see if they can help me tweak this part of the website so that my vision and my reality actually do match up.  I live in hope that this is a possibility!

Here we are at final project time and in the space of three hours today, I have changed my mind three times about the platform on which I want to share my information about inquiry based teaching and learning.  I originally wanted to create a forum on SharePoint because I wanted to share with my staff and my school district staff about inquiry based teaching and had hoped that creating a forum would create a support network for this style of teaching.  SharePoint is our go to program for email, school calendar, messages and district sharing.  I figured that perhaps since we all will be checking SharePoint all the time, this would be the logical place to house a forum so it doesn’t become just one more place to look.

Then I thought, one of my favourite things about being here in Vancouver is being able to network with all these teachers from different districts.  Why would I limit my discussion to just my district?  I want to know what others in the province think about this topic.  Doni introduced me to Yammer and then I though, great, this is going to be my platform to link with other TL’s and teachers interested in Inquiry Based teaching and learning.  But this forum is really just a blog type format and I can’t seem to organize my links, video’s thoughts and ideas in an aesthetically pleasing way that makes me happy.

Then I thought Weebley.  I know that it is prettier than the SharePoint sites we have in our district.  But this is yet another place to link to from my website as I can’t have it come up from my schools website and really, this is about making information accessible and is several steps really the most accessible way to share information.  I don’t want it to become a “Where’s Waldo” hunt.

So now I have gone back to the Project Based Learning button on my school’s homepage.  This is basically just one link and fundamentally useless but my Principal has put it on there.  So then I asked myself, should I improve this link or should it’s home really be on the library website and this button on the main page could link to the library website.  Thus providing more useful information about Inquiry Based teaching and learning as well as possibly drumming up more views and support of the library website.  So as of right this minute, it think I will be adding and Inquiry section to the library website.  I fear that I still won’t have the aesthetics that I desire due to the SharePoint website restriction that engulf the school website but I hope that I will be able to add the information is a useful and practical way…now off to give it a try.