Naval College Professional Development

Staff professional development Oct 19, 2011

This wiki models one means of creating a portal for your students.

- this model prepared by Vance Stevens 

The task this morning is two-fold:

1. Learn how to create a portal in PBWorks for your students (to link to their class work)

2. Brainstorm ways to work in online spaces with your students

Creating the portal

PBWorks at http://pbworks.com is a free wiki service that produces an attractive and functional portal in minutes.  Two other services you can use are http://wikispaces.com and Google Docs pages published on the Web.

The technique is to create a portal like this one for your class. (To do this you must create an acct with PBWorks).

The portal should have an easy to remember URL, like this one NCPD

You can use the portal to set current assignments for your class.  Old assignments can be moved to the sidebar.  For example, in the sidebar here you can find a link to previous professional development sessions

Setting the tasks

The technique today is to see how shared online spaces might work with your students.  I am using http://primarypad.com/ to create links to today's collaborative task (there are several choices; see http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20004686-248.html).  The purpose of this session is to appreciate the look and feel of this genre of software and brainstorm way this might work with colleagues in your office.

In the classroom, tasks can be done

• as a whole class activity with students contributing from laptops to one document projected at the front of the class,
• or you can group the students.  

PBworks reclaims URLs when they have not been revisited for a year.

This wiki was visited and altered by adding this text on October 11, 2021

altered oct. 17, 2022