A lot of good things come in threes: Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker made Cream a supergroup for the ages. Celery, bell pepper, and onion, the “trinity” of cajun and creole dishes. Larry, Moe, and Curly (sorry, Shemp fans). Tinker to Evers to Chance. Shake, rattle, and roll. Bacon, lettuce, and tomato.
The same holds true now in independent school technology. With the arrival of the ISEnet Ning, there is now a pretty much comprehensive suite of tools to use to share, learn, and build relationships with other educators. These tools are all heavily used and offer lots of support, expertise, and encouragement in moving forward with technology.
The new kid on the block is the ISEnet Ning site. Ning is a free social networking service that offers anyone the ability to set up their own social network. Like Facebook or MySpace, you can invite and message with friends, share your thoughts on a blog, join online discussions on topics of interest, share photos, audio files, links, and video, start groups of like-minded friends, and more.
When this site was first announced, I thought, “Great. Another online community to join. Just what I need.” But I have to say, it’s pretty addicting. Many of my online friends - mostly peers at other institutions - are on it, and the options for interacting with them all accommodate however little or much time I have to give to it. Give it a try! It’s not just for tech folks, btw.
The second tool is the School Computing Wiki. Anyone can add content on any topic. It’s a compendium of what educators know, believe, and practice when it comes to the theory and practice of educational technology. There’s a lot of hard-won wisdom there for you. And you can add yours to the mix!
The venerable member of this trio is the ISED-L listserv, which is an e-mail listserv that’s been around for a long time. It’s an active list, so you may want to choose to receive mail in digest form, but it’s a rare week that does not see an engaging question evoke many thoughtul answers. While there are a lot of tech questions asked, there are also recent threads on diversity, curriculum, admission policies, and many other aspects of independent school life. I’m a big fan of ISED-L, but I’m partial since I’m one of the three listserv co-managers. If you do sign up, just remember that replying to a message sends it to the whole list, and posts by members aren’t moderated, so caveat emptor…
There is some synergy among these three online services; my friend Demetri Orlando and others ensure that there is cross talk and some cross posting so that we can share the best of what all three tools have to offer. If one of your new year’s resolutions is to learn more about technology, your timing could not be better. Come and see what this tech “trinity” can do for you!
Happy new year to all!
Posted on December 28th, 2007 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Online Resources
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.