educatorslog.in | news

Dear educatorslog.in members!

This short educatorslog.in update incudes-

1. New Spotlight
2. educatorslog.in on YouTube
3. More new features

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1. New Spotlight: We are proud to continue our run of inspiring stories in the educatorlog.in Spotlight. The latest Spotlight showcases Kamala Nimbkar Balbhavan, Phaltan, Maharashtra. Writer and journalist Dilip D’Souza profiles this wonderful school that has managed to successfully dissolve the barriers of class and caste, in addition to providing a healthy, stimulating learning environment for its student and teacher community. Please do watch and comment in the new comments feature in the Spotlight page.

2. educatorslog.in now on YouTube:  Watch a video introducing the idea of educatorslog.in along with some audio and video clips of members’ feedback. Please do pass it around to friends and others, especially those interested in education. Our thanks to the members who volunteered to give feedback in audio/visual form for this movie. We welcome more such sound-bytes or film clips from members who’d like to share their educatorslog.in experience. We will continue to make more such videos to spread the word about the positive impact that educatorslog.in is having on the education landscape in India. You can watch it on YouTube by clicking the link above or right here in the previous post!

3. More new features: Some of the new and improved features of educatorslog.in include –

* The RSS feature a member suggested in the survey is now ready! You will find the RSS link on the top right links of the pages. Clicking on it will give you the means of setting up RSS feeds of the latest educatorslog.in content on a host of your personal pages including My Yahoo, Google, My MSN, My AOL, and several
others.

* One member had suggested in the survey that there be a way of adding comments to a Spotlight as well, just as you can with other posts in Connect & Share. Well…we listened! Every Spotlight now has an action bar below it which shows the “hit” counter, as well as a button for adding comments. We hope you use this feature to comment on the latest one, as well as the earlier Spotlight entries in the Archive list on the Spotlight page.

We will continue to keep you updated on our on-going efforts to make this a meaningful and useful community space for people involved/interested in education in India. We hope you continue to visit and participate and share and also help pass the word around; and as always, we welcome any feedback, suggestions or comments at feedback@educatorslogin.com

Here’s to continuing to Connect, Share and Grow!

Best regards,
Your educatorslog.in team

A short video that introduces educatorslog.in and also shares some member feedback is now up on YouTube… Please do watch and forward the link around …

Dear educatorslog.in members,

Here is the June 2007 educatorslog.in update –

1. Announcing the new Spotlight
2. The educatorslog,in Survey - Thank you for your feedback!
3. More, more, more new features

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1. The latest Spotlight is on Riverside School in Ahmedabad, along with an inspiring video that showcases the vibrant Riverside student. Do check out - “The Student is an Active Participant in the Learning Process at Riverside School, Ahmedabad” .

2. To mark our 3-month anniversary, around the end of May, we sent out a survey to all members of the educatorslog.in community to solicit your feedback on your educatorslog.in experiences and ideas on how to improve. We’d like to thank each and everyone of you who responded for your very valuable feedback. We’ll be sure to heed most, if not all, of it - sooner or later - and try to incorporate as many of your inputs as we can. (Some are already in place :))

Some highlights -

• Over 70% of the respondents seemed to favor a weekly email of all the new elogs, resources, programs, questions and comments posted to the site, so that may be one of the features we will look to adding in the not-so-distant future
• About 43% of the respondents had specific suggestions for improvement, while the other 53% seemed to think “it’s great as it is!”. Thank you all for the affirmation as well as the suggestions.
• Some quotes and suggestions -
  • “It has personally provided me the opportunity to write and share my thoughts on various aspects of education with other interested members of the community. It has also provided insights into new websites that have been useful for teaching learning.“;
  • “Educatorslog has a made an excellent beginning.“;
  • “ We could have various sections for students, teachers, and policy makers. I would like to add that for students who need counseling maybe once in a while you could have experts answering their questions or have a questionnaire sent in like this one where experts could analyse which field is suitable for them. “
  • “1. Featured interviews with well known figures in this “industry” 2. online interaction channels like IM support 3. Regular commentary by the people running the site on something of relevance 4. RSS feeds so that I can have new content “pushed” rather than having to reach for it 5. Online tutorials on specific subjects“
  • “It might help to make the impact of educatorslog.in more visible - i.e. a section where people are encouraged to post their success stories based on ideas/processes they picked up at Educatorslog.in. This is a bit of a challenge I suppose, but might be worth the effort. Cheers!“
  • “may be some groups to head specific areas can be created and they can lead discussions related to that. I don’t mind leading discussions related to Multiple Intelligences and Gifted Education.A format convenient to lead a group may have to be created.“ (Well, we do have a highly under-used “groups” feature in Connect for precisely this purpose, perhaps some of you may want to make a start with that?)
• For those of you who received the survey but did not respond, the survey is still open, so please do consider sparing 5 minutes of your time to give us your feedback.
• For members who did not receive the survey for any reason or who joined educatorslog.in after the survey was emailed, please feel free to go to this educatorslog.in feedback survey link and give us your feedback. ( http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Ki6aK0kcoI06OJ4VJv_2b3eA_3d_3d)

3. We are constantly working to make several visible and not-so-visible improvements to educatorslog.in. Some of the new and improved features of educatorslog.in include –

• A new Search bar at the top of the educatorslog.in page - visible on all pages on the top right
• New and improved Advanced Search features - you may now search in individual, or some combination of, content types (elogs, resources, programs), by keywords and/or other applicable criteria such as grades/subjects for resources, topics/themes for elogs, and such.
• New organization of the “recent” posts (comments/elogs/resources/programs) on the home (landing) page for easier “one-click” accessibility. Several more comments are displayed now in a slow scroll the “Latest Comments” box(which pauses when the cursor is moved within the box). Several more posts are displayed now in the “Latest Content” box - organized by elogs, resources and programs.
• The RSS feature a member suggested is almost ready to be put in place over the coming days.

We will continue to keep you updated on our on-going efforts to make this a meaningful and useful community space for people involved/interested in education in India. We hope you continue to visit and participate and share and also help pass the word around; and as always, we welcome any feedback, suggestions or comments at feedback@educatorslogin.com

Here’s to continuing to Connect, Share and Grow on educatorslog.in!

Best regards,
Your educatorslog.in team

Hello educatorslog.in community!

It’s been a slightly slow period on educatorslog.in with most teachers busy with exams and corrections! Hopefully things will pick up again as most of us head into our new academic year or summer vacation…

Things have continued to be busy, however, for the educatorslog.in team, as we have worked to get in more features as well as develop the Grow section. Here’s a list of all the changes, additions, and improvements we have worked on, to ensure a better experience for you. Please do give us feedback and continue to stay engaged and, as always, help spread the word about this new and unique space on the Indian educational landscape!

• The first Spotlight is here! We hope you enjoy reading and getting to know about what we see as an exemplary practice that can be adopted as a new practice in a school, or influence the thinking behind an existing practice in a school, and help make it better. As we get ready with subsequent “Spotlights”, please do use email us at spotlight_at_educatorslogin.com to suggest an individual, a school, an organization or an exemplary practice within a school or an organization that could be showcased.
• There are several additions made to the ‘programs’ in the Grow section - programs of various types for teacher education. They are organized by type of program. Please do use the “suggest a program” button to add a program to the list. It will be published to the list once it has been approved by a moderator.
• Introducing the “Listview“! Some members mentioned that it was somewhat difficult to get an easy glimpse of all the elogs that had been posted. We listened! We’ve introduced an alternate way of viewing elogs. The “Summary View” is the default and is the old way of viewing elogs - a small teaser of each elog accompanying the post and the toolbar below the elog to perform some user actions.
  • The alternate “List View” can be brought up by clicking on the “List View” just below the elogs tab. This brings a table of all the elogs listed by title, who posted and when, how many comments had been posted to the elog, and when the last comment had been posted. The good news is that by clicking on the column headings, you could sort the list by any of the four criteria - by title of the post, by when the elog was posted (default sorting criteria), how may comments the elog had got (an indication of the most active discussion, perhaps?), and when the comments were posted. We hope you find this feature useful!
  • We hope to incorporate it in the Share and Grow sections as well for similar easy viewing of all resources and teacher education programs.

• Add/Read Comments has been combined to one button in the elog and resource toolbars. (Some users had informed us that one button for viewing and another one for adding comments was a bit confusing.)

Please do check out these new features and improvements, and let us know what you think!

Cheers!
The educatorslog.in team

Dear educatorslog.in community!

You may have noticed several changes on the educatorslog.in home page now! One of particular relevance is the ‘beta‘ below the title.

With the beta comes a new look to the landing page which –

• Shows the latest elogs, resources, questions and comments (with the username of the member who has posted the comment),
• Has a space to announce which individual or institution the current educatorslog.in “spotlight”is on,
• Limits tags to the 60 most popular (insiead of an interminably long list showing all tags!)
• A link to this News blog (in the footer links), and
• Most important of all, allows open membership to any visitor to the site…SO -
• There is no need for invitations now, since membership is open to all, but you can now inform your friends and colleagues about this site by using the ‘Tell a friend‘ feature - accessible from the link on the top right (in the Connect/Share/Grow pages, when you are logged in).

You will see several changes inside the Connect/Share/Grow sections as well –

• We have simplified the design and now have a single space for all elogs (it is not divided into elog central and elog zone now)
• Improved formatting of text in the forms where you post elogs and resources
• Some new themes/topics have been added to the list (based on feedback from our alpha users)
• In the ‘Submit an elog’ form, you can now select a main topic even if it has sub-topics, if your post applies to the topic in general and not to any particular subtopic under it.
• The Groups functionality has undergone some major improvements (and we continue to work on making this more robust)
• Access to posts - elogs and resources - by ‘tags’ is now accessible not only from the Home Page but from anywhere within the site by clicking on the new ‘Tags’ link on the top right.
• It is much easier now to browse for resources by subject and grade using the links on the left side
• “Questions” - asking and displaying is now restricted to the Share section and is intended to help with questions about specific resources that a teacher or parent may be looking for.
• elogs may not be added as resources now, as we feel (based on user feedback) that it is confusing to see identical posts in both Connect and Share. This is necessary to underscore the idea that - elogs are intended to be more along the lines of opinions, thoughts, ideas, concerns, whereas resources are, well, just that - resources or ready teaching/learning materials that a teacher/parent may be able to use in a teaching/learning situation.
• The Grow section is “growing” - the basic structure is up and we are working on making it functional very soon.

You may notice a few other small changes and improvements that have not been mentioned here.

Please do continue to give us feedback on how we can make this a useful and enjoyable space and experience for all our members. We look forward to hearing from you, and continue to work to include more features that we will share with you soon.

Watch this space!

We have received some encouraging feedback on the idea of this forum from registered users, as well as others interested in becoming a part of this community. It certainly makes our hard work and efforts seem worthwhile. Thanks!

“The portal is very good. Leads to a lot of introspection among educators/teachers. Life in schools like ours can get very monotonous, and subsequently lead to disinterest. Keeping in regular touch with the portal will surely help, for hungry teachers like me.”

“This is a really good move - I am also excited about this.”

“I am really thrilled to be part of this community and I think it has come as an answer to my desire to work with other educators, converse with them on various related issues and share and learn during this process.”

“I’m teaching in North America right now and I haven’t been able to
find a good online area to connect with teachers in different areas.
I am very interested in seeing how teachers around the world educate
their students, the types of lessons they give, and generally how the
education process works in their area. Hopefully I can become a part
of this community and provide a different view on education to the
current users, as well as incorporate some new ideas from your
community into my own teaching methods.

Thanks a lot for providing such an interesting service.” - A teacher in the U.S.

Welcome to the educatorslog.in news blog!!

It’s been about a month since we released the first (alpha) version of this community forum for educators, on issues of education in India. As we head towards the beta release, we thought it would be a good idea to share with our small but growing user community all that has been happening behind the scenes to make educatorslog.in a better experience for all - in terms of improved features, look-and-feel, stability and security.

We hope you will drop in here once in a while to get an update on the latest educatorslog.in news, and also comment and share you views on any issues related to your use of this site (you could also use the feedback link at the bottom of the pages).

STAY TUNED!