In her article, "Vanquish the Clutter Beast with a Schoolwide Intranet", Rhonda Spradling describes her experience about starting teaching at a high school years after the introduction of computers, and finding a "stockpile of digital clutter". This caused "perpetual frustration" and waste of too much time just finding out what existed where. In her "quest for order" she became the leader in creating an "intranet in shining armor", a solution in form of a school wide intranet, which she describes as "one-stop-shopping community". The intranet she created and keeps developing, features places for announcements, blogs, calendars, content pages, discussions, document storage, forms and surveys, popular staff links, as well as personal spaces, team spaces, and not to forget fun factor space for photos or inspirational videos. She garnered support from many involved parties, and created a team spirit project with regular training for all, resulting in a effective intranet that keeps being edited and improved.
This article does not directly relate to a NETS-S, but to most NETS-T standards, namely No. 3 "Model Digital-Age Work and Learning", a-d, and no. 5 "Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership", again all subcategories here. The teacher uses many up-to-date digital tools combined in one big organized system, which will also enable students to learn from and use in the fulfillment of many of their NETS-S standards.
I enjoyed reading this article, not only because of it's great content but also because of the very skilled and picturesque use of the English language here, I could not help but quote her quite often. The author is an English teacher alright! The feat she accomplished is not less impressive, creating a school wide intranet with space for professional but also fun pages, a safe intranet for the students and organizing tool for the staff. Interestingly, she talks about new models for educator effectiveness and evaluation systems ("pay for performance") that first increased the problem by more educators adding to the "information overload", but then brought on the awareness that a solution needed to be found. The solution was found in a corporate model, adjusted for an educational setting. Impressive.
Spradling, R. (2013). Vanquish the clutter beast with a schoolwide intranet. Learning & Leading with Technology, 41(2), 18-21.
Hi Astrid!
ReplyDeleteThe concept described and created in this article sounds very interesting! From what I've gathered, it seems as though Spradling has created a sort of "Facebook" page for her school's community. I find this not only to be a great way of organizing everyone under one accessible umbrella, but also a great step towards introducing kids to ideas that mock popular social media sites. By learning how to be upstanding digital citizens through their schools social media site, students are more likely to leave the classroom with respectable online behaviors.
I enjoyed your use of quotes and sayings as well! Very interesting and thoughtful idea for a teacher to do for her school.:)