Facilitating Collaboration - Session Three

So this week we worked on RSS feeds, setting up a photo sharing site and thinking about Nings in education. How can they be applied to my school or job? Well, first of all I have to recruit some individuals willing to go out on a limb so to speak and get out of their comfort zones. For example? I started a blog for my teacher development group - we're looking to implement a portfolio component to the high school curriculum - and I invited the three other members of my team (start small, right?) and there has been no action (as you can see here). I'll I've heard back that it was too confusing and hard. It was too much to take in just to keep information accessible. UHHHGGGG!(I feel like Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the ball away at the last second...)
Soooooo, I must first find a few individuals willing to be daring - OK, open-minded at least - that will succumb to my exploits of engaging their brains. The RSS feeds are easy - I already envision my students blogging (when the sites are unblogged - I mean unblocked)and subscribing to their feeds so that I don't have to search out their individual blogs to find updates (I was wondering how Louie has managed that all of this time.) I also see using feeds when I find cool blogs that I want to follow, like the science ones I found last week. I've also played with the RSS reader account provided by Google and have created a shared page with interesting blogs I follow.
Photo sharing is also an easy incorporation for me. I've been taking photos during my classes and labs - not of the students, but of the labs and activities themselves. I plan to post these as slide shows and use them in video clips (like those we made in Animoto). I want to post them in various places - my school web pages, our Moodle, the Wiki etc. This would make them viewable by those in the class and on the outside - I hope to help parents answer the question "So what did you do in school today?" Now, understand that there wouldn't be updates by day, but an overview of topics and activities.
Finally, I would love to use Ning in our school, but the site is blocked as social networking and I'm having a bit of a time getting our tech crew to adjust and tweak the filters so that the district is maintaining their policies while opening up restrictions in some areas. So I started a wiki in wikispaces (I'd link you to the home page, but it's private right now to "protect" the students) instead.