The Literacy and the Common Core (LCC) community in NWP Connect is intended to provide a point of entry for members seeking to see what's happening with NWP sites, professional development in writing, and the CCSS.
Entries about the Common Core are being made all over the Connect communities, which is great! This community is not intended to supplant those entries, just to provide a landing spot yo find these interests. We encourage all members to help us achieve that goal through:
- Adding your own posts and comments about CCSS and your site, school, or state
- Uploading, linking, or posting useful content you have come across around the web
- Reposting or referring to great content related to CCSS from other NWP Connect communities
Here's some "how-to" advice:
NWP Connect accepts a wide range of content types: text, audio, video, images, uploaded files. Anywhere you see an 'Add' or 'Create' button, you can use it to open up a composing or uploading window. When you add files or audio/video/image assets, you can also annotate them and people can comment on them. Notice that on this page you have a one-stop widget with all the content buttons for you to use.
Your best option for adding content is a blog post. The blogging widget allows you to write as much or as little as you want. You can add "assets" to your blog (audio, video, images, files) and you can "relate content" to your blog (related discussions or blogs from elsewhere in the community). Your blog will show up in a variety of places, too, making it easier to find your content, and you can always find your blogs through your dashboard.
You can also start a forum discussion or upload shorter bits of content in some of the widgets: chatter comments, direct file uploads, etc. Note, though, that the shorter bits do not show up in members activity streams on their profile dashboards—only posts and comments do.
An overview of the sections:
At the LCC community, we have six main pages: Overview, Community Blogs, Assessment Consortia, Resources, "Talk, Talk, Talk", Events and How-to. (We can add more later if needed.)
The Overview, or home, page, provides a snapshot of the most recent content added to the community. The Overview page also points to our Diigo group which is open to anyone for social bookmarking.
Community Blogs let's you easily skim the most recent blogs added to the community. To add a blog, use the Add Item button.
Resources is for collecting resources for use by writing projects. At the center of the page are portal pages, created with the wiki book feature, which allow us to collaboratively contribute resources. Please help us build wiki books by using the edit button and fixing/adding/deleting as necessary. Before creating a wiki book, check to see if a book exists for your resource topic. If so, add to the book either by editing it or by adding a page to it. That will keep our number of wiki books manageable. If you need to start a new topic, then open a new wiki book and give it a 'topic-focused' name. Resources, like the Overview page, also points to our Diigo group and lets you upload files.
Talk, Talk, Talk points you to contributions of audio and video, including recordings of local events or videos of speakers. Community members are welcome to add items of interest to NWP folks interested in the Common Core as well as adding thoughts through video and audio recordings. In other words, you can 'just talk.'
How-to is, well, where you are now.
Managing for abundance: some advice
Members are encouraged to plan for the future when there may be a lot of content in the community and individual entries are hard to find. Here's some advice:
1) Use tags to help people find your stuff.
Tags make your content easier to find over time. Simple topical tags are best, using the terms that the searcher is likely to think of. When you enter tags, give the system time to feed you a list of preexisting tags. It is best to use a preexisting tag when possible so that your content shows up with other like content. There is a tag cloud on the Resources page that will give you an idea of the most popular tags. There is no need to tag by your name or writing project site as these show up easily in search results.
2) Pull in related content.
Connect gives you lots of options for connecting your content to related content. Whenever you see "related content" or "assets" as an option on the left-hand side of an authoring window, you can make links between your content and other content in the site. That will help cluster items together even if they are written by different people or posted at different times.
Thank you in advance for contributing to this collection of material to help all of us in Writing Project sites think about and respond to the Common Core.