Evaluating Online Learning: Challenges and Strategies for Success features seven evaluations of online learning programs or resources.

This report provides useful information on an issue of growing importance to all our affiliates.

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By John McCormick | Chicago Tribune reporter
11:48 PM CDT, July 8, 2008

Fans use his Web site to rip shifts in policy

The same Internet-fueled power that led to historic gains in organizing and fundraising for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is now providing a platform for fiery dissent in a most unlikely place: his own Web site.

The following is a presentation that outlines plans for integrating Web 2.0 functionality into GEM architecture.

Since GEM has reached critical mass in terms of usage--some one million visits a month-- and a number of those visitors are active participants in vetting and commenting on resources, we want to expand the opportunities that GEM visitors are presented with once they visit the site--opportunities to share resources with their colleagues by direct email from within GEM, ability to rate resources or to submit them to other online forums (DIGG), etc.

Additionally, we’re planning a redesign that will keep the search interface “simple” –like Google—yet introduce a “social networking” interface allowing users to interact. Think “Facebook for Educators.”

I met with Eric Sherman--a marketer who represents partnership between NEA/Saturn--to discuss GEM. They’ve agreed to publish a white paper that will help the GEM partnership become an educators "household term" much like Google is to the Net user--"Just Google it!"

Additionally, GEM will be working with Living Library--a Web-based, intergenerational mentoring program --to determine possible integration scenarios.

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Thanks JP!

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July 2008 – On second anniversary with NEA, the Gateway to 21st Century Skills ready for Web 2.0! Technical improvements speed performance. June 2008 shows a whopping 60% increase in visits to the Gateway over June 2007. New resources bring Gateway total to over 50,000!

SDEA Membership Organizing Team will meet tomorrow in Pierre, SD to learn about social media.

The team will not use social media to engage members but instead will explore related tools to help manage its campaign to recruit new members.

The idea to explore and engage in social media was the idea of SDEA leaders during their last team meeting. I will be giving the group a tutorial on various social media tools that may help with SDEA's membership campaign--help the team centralize its communications and organize data related to the campaign.

I created a closed private social network using an online tool--"Ning."

[note to HSTA folks-- this is the same application that HawaiiConCon.org is usingto manage their online awareness campaign. See: http://www.hawaiiconcon.org/]

You are welcome to join the network and observe...

Visit South Dakota Education Association

Executive Briefings
Published July 2008

Lindsay Edmonds Wickman

Second Life may have started out as a playground for techies, but it has become a well-known virtual world where people play, do business and learn. As a result, more organizations are making the transition to virtual and ultimately finding an engaging, cost-effective training platform.

CQ WEEKLY – VANTAGE POINT

Music and politics have a long history: the musicians-cum-activists of the 1960s and ’70s, the Live Aid and Free Tibet concerts in the ’80s and ’90s, and the concert/political fundraisers hosted by Bruce Springsteen and Elton John on behalf of presidential candidates John Kerry and Hillary Rodham Clinton.