Wednesday, February 21, 2007
TappedIn - Community for Teachers
TappedIn is an online meeting place for teachers who seek to continue their professional development. When I first logged into the site, I felt like I was going to a Halloween party wearing my retro suit. Yea, it's a bit old fashioned and outdated. But, I liked it for some reason. It's like when all these new, fancy computer games come out. Yea, they are great, exciting, and fun. But, sometimes you just want to play the old classics like Pacman and Donkey Kong. --On the bottom third of the screen, there is a message box with all the users who are logged in. Almost immediately after I signed on, the moderators of the message box welcomed me and asked me if I needed help. This was nice. It was also necessary because I don't think I would have been able to find what I was looking for without them. I enjoyed looking through the "Passageways", which is a list of various discussion groups for all kinds of education professionals. I told the moderator that I was interested in a discussion on CALL or instructional technology, and he showed me the group I should join. I think this group, called the Webheads in Action, holds a video meeting once a week. So, I am going to try to sit in on the next one.--Even though this site is a little outdated (you can tell it's designed/run by teachers), it's very informative. If you are a teacher, and you want to discuss just about anything that has to do with education, this is a great place to look. It's especially great for ESL/EFL teachers, because sometimes there is a lack of professional development opportunities at this point. Well, I'm going to put on that retro suit and play a little Pacman.
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6 comments:
Go Pacman!!!
I too was impressed by the personal greeting when I signed in. I was absolutely shocked to have a conversation with a real person immediately upon my arrival to tapped in.
Did you find any other discussion groups besides the webheads that sounded interesting to you?
Hi Eric, honestly, I didn't stay in there long and didn't look around for any other groups. What about you, did you find something that you want to join?
I wonder if the world of cyberspace is packed with sites that are slowly decaying as former young, single teachers get married, pick up other activities, and otherwise lose their passion for keeping abreast of technological innovation that might lead to the hottest site. Eventually, some of these sites will be coopted by text book manufacturers or something and then the budgets will allow for updating over many years. At least that is my off the cuff opinion!
Doug
Ms. Pac-Man always lured me in more!
Dear John,
You've gone to far this time. What do you mean by you can tell that the site was designed by teachers?
Some of older friends enjoyed pacman as teens and something else we didn't have the luxury of technology choices.
By the way I enjoyed retro and disco so should I still give you a call anytime?
Technically, you're right. This is the product of teachers. However, it is also the work of programmers.
I believe that the reason it hasn't changed much over the last few years is that the money is likely gone. This was developed on a grant or series of grants and I'm sure that they are either over or dwindling.
I think that there was an attempt to bring money in by setting up campuses (Pepperdine was in here and probably still is). I don't think that it worked though. I've even seen Pepperdine in other spaces, including Second Life.
This is a large issue with grant projects. It is very, very difficult to keep projects going over the grant funds are depleted. There's really only a couple ways to get this done: (1) Get university funding, (2) Try to get new grant funding for improvements or other aspects of the project that can keep the original part running, or (3) spin it off into a business. None of these are easy to do. Most end up trying to spin these off into a business, but this is rarely successful. Therefore, most of these projects have about a 5 years life cycle then they tend to fade into obscurity.
Dan
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