Your Subject Association Doesn’t Need a Web Site

A while back, a former superintendent wanted to know if I would help the OAJE (Ontario Association of Junior Educators) with their website.  I said sure – that would be something interesting to do.

When I ran into is something that I think that happens to a lot of organizations.  Started by good intentioned people, eventually time takes its toll.  It’s difficult to keep new and interesting content up front.  If the webmaster becomes involved with other things, sometimes it can be a while between updates.  That was the case here.  It’s nobody’s fault; it just happens.

The good news is that there were a core group of people who wanted to get something moving.  It wasn’t my intention to become the next life-long webmaster so I offered group collaborative approach instead.  It’s not a new concept, the ACSE (Association of Computer Studies Educators) has done this for a while.

What’s interesting is that, these days, the computer internet using educator doesn’t limit herself to going to one site to get all information.  In fact, that location is really a portal to the collection of information.

With that in mind, I set up the following:

• a Google Site;
• a Diigo Account;
• a Twitter Account;
• a Google Plus Presence.

The organization let me run with the ideas and I met with a group of the executive in Burlington to hand over the keys.  In addition to the above, they had decided to create a Facebook presence and had elected to use Delicious rather than Diigo to share their resources.

In my mind, I think that the Google Site will serve nicely as their home base for things like publications and support for the Ontario Curriculum.  The Delicious resource will serve as a great spot for sharing online links for Junior teachers.

If you’re a teacher of the Junior Years’ student, you need to know about this.  Membership in OAJE is free and the power of the site will only come when everyone chips in and tags resources to the Delicious account.  The possibilities are there; the membership just needs to step up and help.

 

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