Whilst wasting away my evenings at the annual 2012 AP HUG reading, I’ve taken some time to research how I could add components to this site to make it possible for the many visitors who visit to contribute, interact, and get even more from this than what there already is. Not to mention there seems to be a painful dearth of “open-source” teaching sites devoted to AP HUG. Many others have already responded to this by creating various wikis and archives of resources. I hope to add to that with this site.
I’ve come across the following ideas and will be gradually incorporating them:
Forums – Forums will serve as a discussion board for teachers, students, and any visitor to discuss AP HUG related items. I added this based on the recommendation from a fellow teacher to have a place for students to interact with students from different places. One interesting component to forums is that individuals can add meta-tags to their posts – this might make searches on this site all the more interesting if they included discussion topics.
Wikis – I’ve also added a feature that will enable teachers and/or students to collaborate on wikis. This links to a sample wiki to see how it works. I’ll have to create the wikis on the backend of the site, but once they are published, I can archive them on a general “Wiki” page. Plus, wikis can be tagged and indexed to become a part of the infrastructure of the site.
Guestbook – As you can see from the “visitors online now” and the Map of Visitors to the right, this site gets hits from all over the world. Many of these people are searching for maps, and other AP HUG related items. I would love for them to tell us where they are from, and why where they are from is interesting.
As for whether anyone will use these, that is another question, time will tell I guess. I welcome anyone’s ideas for what you see as a way to increase the opportunities for teachers to share their resources, best practices, and even students to potentially collaborate. I know that there are other sites that already do what these additions purport to add, but I am hopeful that this could benefit both teachers and students.
