WHY THE WEB SITE: Some thoughts from the Director
Smartworks Education Webpage represents the firm we established several years ago as an Education Centre for tutoring Primary and Secondary Students. As such, it is significant for online representation so there is an added requirement to get it right. Our goal for this site is to fomulate a convenient, useful, educational reference point for our current community as well as establish an excellent portal for prospective visitors to our site.
We believeis that dialogue between teacher and student is critical to performance on a whole range of levels, and computers serve to enhance this dialogue, not replace the pastoral and cognitive aspect of the teacher. The central Node includes a 'LinkedIn' account . This was established as a site in which all those connected with the Centre can establish a dialogue on a more serious and professional level. A site for action research via the "Smartworks Education Futures Partnerships' discussion board. The linked In account makes it easy to gather prospective interested'others', collate data and connect with like minded others both within the area and across Australia as a whole.
The 'Disqus' Blog site is linked across multi platforms. Visitors can access with their generic logins. The blogs are moderated by the web author due to the nature of the site engaging students. I thought it important to enact a login perameter rather than be totally open to avoid sensitive content within a child protected environment. I have collated the multiple login facet through Friendfeed to make it easier to manage rather than multiple accounts. The site needs to be dynamic, the presence of the blog site, as well as Twitter for micro mobile-bloggers, most of which every student over the age of 12 has a mobile. The RSS functionality will will allow people to subscribe to each others sites, and easily link to each others comments and via trackbacks, can see when anyone else links to their pages and can respond with either reciprocal links, or by adding comments."
The weblog idea is useful because it gives users with limited knowledge of HTML an alternate, mobile tool to communicate. This transforming power of weblogs makes consumers into creators, and from audience to creator to assist limit the negative affects of a media saturated culture
The Delicious Bookmarks site targets key educational innovations, in order to give the visitor to the site an understanding that we do keep pace with current theory and reflect in our pedagogy a relevent approach to the style and type of activities we offer.
