Next Steps

Our next steps

Our goal has become to hone, over time and in collaboration with folks elsewhere, a toolkit of free/low-cost communication tools and strategies enabling diverse supporters to collaborate in student success.

In Somerville in 2011-12, we'll:

-continue to test texting "teams"

-pilot and tweak our dashboard views with principal, teachers and families, and continue to develop the efforts of the Parent Connector Network and the broader schoolwide communication toolkit.

-We also want to learn what happens when the ePortfolio seeds across Somerville High School!

In 2011-12, with funding from the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine (itself funded by the MacArthur Foundation) and with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, we'll be inviting OneVille participants to share their work and ideas in person and online with people concerned with how youth and adults in public schools can innovate such uses of everyday tech.

One goal for the year will be to keep honing online documentation like this wiki's. What online reporting would best support other diverse communities exploring such uses of commonplace and low-cost tech in public school communities?

Uche will be leading the Boston-area coordination, Jedd will keep helping with gluing documentation together, and the authors of the main working group pages on this website, with some additions, will be reporting out on their ongoing work!

Mica has started a West Coast effort and is working to link San Diego innovators to Somerville innovators! She has moved to direct CREATE (the Center for Research on Equity, Assessment, and Teaching Excellence) at the University of California San Diego (http://www.create.ucsd.edu). There, with new colleagues and community, she's focusing first on testing communication tools for enabling partnership between university people and local K-12 teachers, families, and young people. CREATE has particular strength in teacher professional development programs and youth development efforts, so Mica will be working with West Coast colleagues to learn how to help network local teachers to each other, youth to teachers, and mentors to youth.

So, we'll now be working bicoastally to improve everyday communications in public education. Starting this year, we hope to work with people in other communities toward a "toolkit" for public education, by creating and testing free/low cost tools and strategies for supporting communication and collaboration between the diverse people who share young people's lives.

The Next Layer: Connecting to Folks Doing Similar Work in Other Communities.

We'd love to spark a lively exchange on this website between people working on similar things. It takes a local network to raise a child; it takes a national network to brainstorm the infrastructure for doing it. So, we've tried to create a lot of places where people could add comments.

Want to talk further?

Our goal with this website has been to connect to, inform, and support people doing related work elsewhere.

Are you working on improving communications in your own school or community?

Contact us directly at xxxxx [add someone's email? or cut this?].

How'd we do in sharing our own first efforts?

We want to connect to more people improving communications in public education and so, we've been experimenting with sharing our own work online!

Tell us:

• Did we format our examples in useful ways?
• Did we offer too much information on what we did, or not enough?
• Do you want to know more about what we've been doing?
• Would you contact us to share what you've been doing?

Some issues we’ve been thinking about (related to our Vision for OneVille documentation) and haven't resolved:

• Audience: can researchers, teachers, families, and youth all share one form of documentation? (That’s what we’ve tried to do here.)
• How do you most effectively show examples of local efforts and innovations in public education? How many words can you use? When might you use pictures or videos? How/when can words and visuals go together?

Another Next Layer: National Networks for Sharing Local Efforts Like These?

Think about it: What might happen if lots of youth, families, and educators started sharing out their educational innovations more generally, online? Innovating solutions for public education is fun -- and it pulls people together. In an era where lots of people are criticizing public schools' teachers, parents, and students, we need to connect to others who believe that there’s no limit to what these partners can do.