Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Collaborating with the Collaboration at Dirigo Middle

I made a quick trip up to Dixfield today to finalize the plan and contract with the wonderful educators at T W Kelley Dirigo Middle School. DOE now will have their IID MOU as required by the feds, and I will be able to devote considerable time to work with Dirigo teachers who are becoming mentors through the Western Maine Educational Collaborative Literacy Project. I'll be working with Sarah Sirois, eMINTS teacher Tania Clark, and others in supplementing the work of Darlene Bassett . . . although Darlene doesn't know it yet! :) In other words, we will be investigating more ways of integrating technology into the literacy initiative ideas. Let's just call it an augmented professional learning community! :)

See Mountain Valley Literacy Project Information
Literacy Across the Curriculum
Professional Learning Communities

2 comments:

Joe Makley said...

Jim,
I work with the same collaborative at Jay, and we are now both recipients of the Rural Utilities Services grants for Tandberg teleconferencing units. So maybe we could sit in on a presentation or two! Darlene Bassett is a tough taskmaster with those mentors, but very forgiving of new technologies. (We have a lot of scars from trying to use ATM rooms for the presentations.) The literacy work has had outstanding results at Jay. It's the best example I've seen of a staff development program being truly embedded and changing practice. (I am sure EMINTS meets this high standard, but we didn't have enough poverty to apply!)

Jim Burke said...

Thanks for this additional perspective on the WMEC Literacy Initiative, Joe.

Can you tell us more about the Tandberg teleconferencing units? Perhaps a post on the subject?