My SSLE Design Project Ideas

 

SSLE Site: http://sites.google.com/a/gmu.edu/castleton-elementary-pta/Home

 

 

 

 

 

Design Ideas

 

For my SSLE project, I want to design a Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE) for a fictional public school's PTA in Prince William County. This environment will host a collection of materials, information and ideas parents and teachers could share regarding their children. This project will be developed in a public learning environment and contain posting of meetings, events, announcements, links to educational and child health related resources. The main goal of this module is to connect parents who are unable to attend the PTA meeting to staff members at the school by posting meeting notes to the learning environment

 

 

 

Possible Audience

 

The targeted audiences are elementary school parents, who are unable to attend traditional PTA meetings at their local school. The size of my audience will be roughly 500 to 700 working parents who have children attending the school. In addition, the schools faculty and staff will be included in the targeted audience because the site will be used as a communication device to get important information out to parents and provide contrast online communication though quick mail and chats.

 

 

 

Content

 

The learning environment will consist of numerous tools to help parents stay in touch on what is going on in their child’s school. The site will also have a parent’s corner, which will provide parents with material regarding their child’s education and health. Other web 2.0 tools available on the site will familiarize parents on the newest technologies that are available in the classroom as well as on the site.

 

Pages to include:

 

• Welcome Page: Brief introduction and school mascot widget.

   

• PTA Membership page: PTA related information, downloadable documents, graph widgets, and a comment/ questions box.

   

• Activities page: Comments & suggestions box, Flickr widget.

   

• News page: iCal calendar, notes widgets, Educational RSS Feeds.

   

• Parenting Corner: Health/ educational news feeds box, pediacare podcast widget, del.icio.us tags box, Quick mailbox, and links to parenting website.

   

• Web 2.0 page: Wikipedia definition on web 2.0, Web 2.0 RSS feeds box and a social bookmarking box.

   

 

 

Format

 

Structural and Functional Aspects will be a webpage with multiple pages consisting of School news, information on becoming a PTA member, Events, Parental information (podcast, links and RSS feeds) and Web 2.0 information. The reasoning for choosing this educational SSLE is to connect parents to information they may have missed at the PTA meetings, provide parenting links and podcast and to keep them up to date on their child’s development and health. The types of communication, collaboration, or aggregation tools that are needed to access this site are an Internet connection, School email account to login into Google Apps, basic knowledge of the software used. Support for the sites primary media content types in Google apps, which allow you to add content to the page such as videos, calendars, documents, slideshows, podcast, and gadgets.

 

 

 

Example Site

 

http://sites.google.com/

 

(Scroll Down and click on Classroom, for the example) 

 

 Site#2

 

http://sites.google.com/a/gmu.edu/cwc-system/Home

 

 

 

  Self-evaluation

 

•  I have everything organized on pages on my Google site that allow the user to navigate with ease and every page has a working title that lets the user know what page they are currently on.

   

• The change made to improve the way the PTA gets its information out was to have basic information that is displayed on the schools website available on Google apps.

   

• My Site adds a few more extras such as virtual pet mascot for the children to interact with, podcast on parenting, PTA membership information, information on school activities and events with videos and pictures, news feeds and a online chat application.

   

• To improve future SSLE I would recommend schools use tools and gadgets that are interactive.