Getting things started...

[David Truss]

Please check out my post, here in FieldFindr, telling you where this all started and/or answer the questions below. Thanks in advance for being one of the early adopters... your input will help make this site a useful resource!

1. Is this Ning space a good venue for a portal like this?

2. What suggestions do you have to make this work?
(Example: Should we create 'Groups' around specific subject areas?)

3. What, if any, approaches should be taken to promote this beyond the world of edubloggers?
(After we get #2 sorted out)

[Claudia Ceraso]

Is Ning a good venue?
I think Ning is easy to use for both expert and new social web users. The idea is to get people outside the edublogosphere to interact with our students. For reasons of security, it may be a good idea to have people/volunteers registered in one site so that the whole community has an easy access to the results of the experience. (Teachers could be asked to post/share some reference lines about the volunteers they have met virtually in their profile pages-just a thought).
They say there is always a blog. Perhaps it is also true about Ning. Exploring Ning sites of other fields might give us an idea or references of a person's online behaviour before we ask them to interact with our students.

Associated wikispace
Perhaps it could be re-purposed to complement this site. The wiki has been quite visible!

[Tammy Moore]

1. Photos, videos, and forums have the tag system that may assist with searching, but we may need a database tool for the data. Do you plan to use the tags and the forum for data or did you have a linkable database in mind?

2. Most volunteers and teachers who would ask a volunteer to get involved with a class will be thinking about the local 'diveability' of volunteering. I think we need to help volunteers and teachers learn about net tools so they can volunteer anywhere/anytime without thinking about how far away they need to drive to get there. The tools are available and often free. Elluminate's free, 3-seater vRoom will allow a volunteer's computer and a teacher's computer to link and they would have full duplex audio, a whiteboard for presentations (including a quick way to do PowerPoint), webcam, and more. Having some training for volunteers and teachers in how to use these tools would be very helpful. I run free training classes on Elluminate most weekdays: 3:30pm central for participant's training (what a student needs to know to participate in an online Elluminate classroom) and Moderator/Teacher training is at 4:30pm Central most weekdays. My online, Elluminate classroom has unlimited seating, so it would be easy for me to accomodate the training sessions.

3. My brother-in-law used to volunteer himself as an experienced software engineer in the schools in his area. I will ask him how he found out about the program or if he has suggestions.

[David Truss]

Claudia,
Security, and more specifically 'Safety' will be important, and needs to be addressed on a site like this, but really it will be up to the teacher to do the screening. I see two needs for us to do support around safety:
1. What should teachers teach students about associating with online 'friends'/volunteers etc.
2. What do we suggest teachers do to check the background of volunteers. This could include teachers giving volunteers very specific guidelines around contacting students publicly only.
For Example:
If you go to my Science Alive Wiki you won't see any last names, or for that matter even the name of our school! However, if only one kid makes a mistake, it is forever present in the history of a page. Also, page editing is 'invite only', and so no one could contact my students on that wiki, but if a volunteer had access, then he/she could wiki-mail a kid without me knowing. I would have to have very clear instructions about a volunteer only using the public wiki page 'Discussions' and never using wiki-mail to converse with students, (#2 above). Students must also be clear about these expectations, (#1 above).
Back to this site... Here we need to provide suggested guidelines, and help teachers that are new to this kind of collaboration think about safety, but it would be unrealistic to go beyond that.

The fieldfindr wiki- I closed it to prevent things happening in 2 places... in hindsight that was a poor choice... I should leave it open until we know how we can meaningfully proceed- I'll change it after this post- Thanks for the advice!
It is great having you on board Claudia, I never imagined that I would have more in common with an English Language Teacher in Argentina than I do with teachers down the hall:-)

Tammy,
I like the idea of 'Specific Tags' for a site like this.
Perhaps something to differentiate it from other links on Ning as well.
Prefixes like 'Edu- ' used by educators looking for Volunteers & 'Vol-' used by volunteers looking for classes.
So,
Edu-Biologist would be teacher seeking biologist &
Vol-Biologist would be a volunteer biologist seeking a class.
Profiles could have information to narrow down choices. What do you think? (Sometimes I over-complicate things.)
As for a database tool... I think this whole thing should be bigger than a Ning site, but I lack the knowledge and resources to go beyond what we can do here. (Not to mention time issues!)

And Finally... the purpose of this site is already proving valuable...
I am volunteering to help a teacher present del.icio.us to high school students. He uses Elluminate, and although I have been on it (briefly) before, I could use your talents to get Moderator/Teacher training... A volunteer, helping a volunteer, helping a teacher!
(I will be in touch later this month to get the training if it is ok with you:-)

I'm wondering, do we create some 'groups' to make this site more navigable or should they naturally develop as needed?