CFF Communities

To ensure success of a community, it's important to ensure that the site meets the needs of the community, fulfills a functional need of the community and regularly measures success and gathers ideas for continual improvement.  Given these success factors, please comment on one or more of the following:

 What works about this site?

What doesn't work?

What do you learn from the site that could be applied to the classroom?

 What changes would you like to see?

How frequently can you reasonably expect to visit the site and participate?

Notes from teacher session:

• What is working:
• Good collaboration space
• Easy to use
• Things show up automatically when signed up; notification by email
• What is not working
• Not enough content
• Need more people interacting
• End of year limited usage
• Some topics too broad - ask concise questions to get good responses
• Avoid making a post that is noise -- make  point
• Need to better understand core goals of the group
• 
  
• What should be the focus of the posts
• News or promotions that would be relevant to the  group  (money, grants, awards)
• Branch to include interesting website would be useful
• Posting on de.li.cious was interesting
• Things that make interaction more interesting on this site
• Website with pre-set categories where anyone can add; make it easier to find info
• Better tool might be more of a wiki format:  include blogs as well as organization
• Need content to make it worthwhile
• Rick:  the structure will emerge; teachers:  would prefer the structure
• Make tags to select from
• Make a discussion group coming out of the meeting -- what should be the tags
• Clearinghouse or build our own content
• If found an online resource here would have high confidence level versus
  
• Have this forum point to resources that the group has had a good experience with
• Put own content in and reference (assumes everyone has a website available to post and then link from here)
• Include ratings with recommendations
  
• What have you learned that could be applied to your classroom
• Today's Encinitas post will be useful to review; JRCC has same model and will compare;
• de.li.ci.ous site was useful for the wiki building
• tagging will help
  
• How frequently can you reasonably access and contribute to the site
• Depends on how worthwhile (really worthwhile sites visited daily; more content than more often)
• Probably event driven; if in mailbox and interesting will go; if can't find something quickly leave quickly
• event driven - if get email about posting and interesting will determine if go to site; may or may not reply depending on schedule; doubt it would be a weekly half hour habit
• This is job now so will look at frequently; will help to get emails; first time forum participation so want to get involved; wiki involvement has been difficult
• To get started need a reminder; summer may provide some opportunity; email reminder important; may want to put in as alert to remind
• event driven - email and subject has to be specific and of interest
• specific subjects needed and need reminder
• Specific and email reminder; want a project or problem we are solving to really invest  time