Getting My School Network Off the Ground

On Friday I organized a meeting with about 6 teachers and my assistant principal and discussed the possibility of running an online social network at our virtual school. All the teachers and admin at the meeting liked the idea and have volunteered to be network administrators to help me monitor the content. The pilot program will include the small group of teachers and however many students volunteer out of the 400-500 that I am inviting. When Ive done this in the past with just my online students, I usually get a 25% sign up rate. So there is a good possible we might get over 100 additional students in the network. I've sent out 375 invites this weekend and in the last 24 hours, 15 students have signed up. These are students who are reading their emails on the weekends so its off to a good start.

The main reason for trying to expand this from my 4 online courses to over 10 classes is too try and create a community at my school. Students are not connected at our charter school. They come in once a week and sit on computers (for the most part) and rarely talk with other students. They almost NEVER talk with other students about school related issues. It would be great if kids joined Odyssey of the Mind (pic), made some friends, and eventually began collaborating. It should be fairly easy to get kids working on projects together if they knew each other. To take it a little further, with 7 teachers and a hundred kids, there is no reason that we can't begin doing cross curriculum projects.

There are so many possibilities for our kids if this works. Engage, collaborate, befriend, help, share, expand.......

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas about making this work, you know what to do....