Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

COV project website updates and a group for Oklahoma TitleIID winning districts

I used SeaMonkey’s free webpage composer application and the Cool Text website (Thanks the “No Time To Sleep” blog author) to update the homepage of our main “Celebrate Oklahoma Voices” project website today with simplified links:

Celebrate Oklahoma Voices - New website links

Our installation of Joomla is still running VERRYYY slowly on POWWEB servers, and we’ve needed to migrate our site to a different and more responsive interface for many months. This isn’t a negative reflection on Joomla, rather I think it is continuing MySQL simultaneous connection and response problems at POWWEB which compelled me in the past year to switch my personal websites over to Siteground. (An ISP with which I have been VERY pleased and satisfied, incidentally.)

Last Thursday on September 18th, the Oklahoma State School Board announced winners of the 2009 Oklahoma Title IID instructional technology grants. Educators in winning school districts should join our COV learning community group “Title IID Awardees” for updates and information relating to TitleIID workshops. We’re planning to share a webinar in late October which will provide details and answer questions about these workshops. Before and after the webinars, however, we’ll use the discussion forum in this group to solicit and field questions. For more info, please see this initial post in the TitleIID group.

I’m considering using Adobe Acrobat Connect for these webinar meetings. I’ve become familiar with Elluminate as a result of my involvement with the K-12 Online Conference, but haven’t used Adobe’s web meeting environment for several years, since it was still Macromedia’s Breeze. I’m eager to gain some protracted, personal experiences using Adobe Connect as well so I can form an informed personal opinion about the relative merits and drawbacks of each platform for synchronous web meetings. To date I have been VERY impressed with Elluminate. It can be, however, quite expensive (I’m told) for organizations to license on a large scale.

Hopefully this is clear on our main COV website, learning community, and online application, but just in case it isn’t I’ll repeat it here. CURRENT PK-20 OKLAHOMA EDUCATORS CAN AND ARE INVITED TO APPLY for our November 5-7 COV workshops in Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Educators in districts receiving Oklahoma TitleIID grants should NOT apply using that online form, however, but instead await instructions which will be forthcoming in late October about planning and scheduling a COV workshop for teachers. These updates will be posted in our Title IID Awardee learning community group. Districts have two years to utilize awarded TitleIID funds for professional development.

More background about Celebrate Oklahoma Voices is available.

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One response to “COV project website updates and a group for Oklahoma TitleIID winning districts”

  1. Wesley Fryer Avatar

    Shortly after posting this entry I received the following email from POWWEB:

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