Introduction

I had a wonderful time meeting some of you at NECC. Now I am exciting about attending our iEARN International Conference and Youth Summit in Cairo, Egypt. There will be about 800 teachers from about 70 countries and 300 youth from around the world. This is has always been a great experience for me. I will be adding some resources if I can remember where that is ; ) The Teachers Guide to International Collaboration on the Internet http://www.ed.gov/teachers/how/tech/international/index.html and Multimedia Guide to iEARN (contains many resources useful for anyone) http://us.iearn.org/professional_development/multimedia/index.html. These are great resources for teachers just getting their feet wet in International Collaboration. After attending this groups session at NECC I see the need to revise the Teachers' Guide. Ray Myers of DOE was there too so he may agree and let us do it. There are also some great resources from the Peace Corps Paul D. Coverdell World Wise Schools http://www.peacecorps.gov/wws/ Especially look at their free publications. As for myself, I am the professional development coordinator for International Education and Resources Networks (iEARN) USA. http://us.iearn.org I started out with international collaborations through e-mail more than 20 years ago as a high school media coordinator in Raleigh, NC.

I'm Jared from Corvallis Oregon. My company has recently completed the public beta version of our web based software. I'm here to introduce to teachers and students. It's a general use application that I think is best suited for classes and undergraduate level or greater students. Probably the best way to think about the software at first is as an online portfolio where students can organize and discuss their course, notes, and assignments. There are also very powerful security settings that are perfect for collaborative projects and private class discussions.

We're branding the offering as a "Social Desktop." A Social Desktop is a web application that allows anyone to create, share, and discuss content for both private and public use. Security settings are completely user defined. Your desktop can be entirely private and closed off to the entire world, or completely open, like a blog. The security settings are so refined that any part of your desktop can be defined exactly as you choose. Most importantly, you have complete control over any content on your own desktop, or shared by another user. I hope I'll be able to start up a dialog with many of you so we can determine the best application of this software for you classrooms and students.

Jared

Replies

Jared July 9, 2007 at 6:11pm

I'm Jared from Corvallis Oregon. My company has recently completed the public beta version of our web based software. I'm here to introduce to teachers and students. It's a general use application that I think is best suited for classes and undergraduate level or greater students. Probably the best way to think about the software at first is as an online portfolio where students can organize and discuss their course, notes, and assignments. There are also very powerful security settings that are perfect for collaborative projects and private class discussions.

We're branding the offering as a "Social Desktop." A Social Desktop is a web application that allows anyone to create, share, and discuss content for both private and public use. Security settings are completely user defined. Your desktop can be entirely private and closed off to the entire world, or completely open, like a blog. The security settings are so refined that any part of your desktop can be defined exactly as you choose. Most importantly, you have complete control over any content on your own desktop, or shared by another user. I hope I'll be able to start up a dialog with many of you so we can determine the best application of this software for you classrooms and students.

Jared

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