Sarah Zdenek’s Weblog

Cliff was in town on Wednesday and we had a “portal people” meeting.  We talked about the importance of finding the early adapters in relation to my project and the plan is I will be on the phone once we return from break.  I have set up a time to talk to Ryan in South Dakota and started some correspondence with Dr. Cole at the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future.  Cliff wants to set up a “low hanging fruit” demo and then spend time finding those who would be interested in partnering.  So I think that next week the portal automation system is supposed to be up and running and then we’ll get an example made.

I have been working on developing a demo portal for teachers.  I first looked at what was available in the eGranary and then began a list of additional resources available on the Internet that we would need to ask permission to use.  So far I have approximately one hundred resources to put in the portal.  We are at a standstill for the moment as the style sheets are created and the portal automation process is developed.  Cliff is out of town meeting with partners and others until Thanksgiving, so I will spend the next week creating a resource list for a student demo portal.

I have still been ill but I did manage to go in for most of the week this past week. We had a training on FrontPage and I will be putting together a practice web site to demonstrate what we learned.

I spent most of my time catching up on emails and doing more research on Teach for America. I am working on setting up a meeting for Cliff to meet with a Teach for America representative when he goes to D.C. in a few weeks.

Most importantly, I have begun to collect materials from the eGranary to construct a demo portal that would function as a teacher toolkit. I am in the collection management/aquisition phase where I will use the previously defined national standards to select materials and put then into a table to later be run through the new automated portal building protocol that is in development. It will utilize CSS to define the user experience and should ultimately lead to the creation of a student centered portal demo as well.

My goals for the semester have become more defined as I move out of the research phase and into the creation phase. Although I am still researching the measurable effects of bandwidth and student learning and possible partnerships and funding streams, I will attempt to build these two portal demos before the end of the semester. In this way, I feel as though my time at WiderNet will have a definitive product attached to it.