Monday, January 07, 2008

TakingITGlobal takes over Eduspaces

Last I looked Eduspaces was closing its door and shutting its service due to an inability to maintain it as a free service. Oh, I thought, OK, what are my Grade 9 and 10 students going to do for their blogs now? OK, let's worry about that when school starts.......

For 2 years now I have had older students using the ELGG-platform through Eduspaces.

I have really enjoyed using Eduspaces as an alternative to Blogger. My other blog is a sort of alternative 'flat world' mixture, but I have not updated it recently. One post written October 2006 gives more details about 'Community Learning with ELGG' and the experiences my students and I were having with the Eduspaces facility. I love the way it allows communities to be created and how cross-links can easily be made between other bloggers and communities. I am a great fan of Ning now but find features in ELGG/Eduspaces that are still unique or more applicable to 'blogging' in its real form, rather than all the facets of social networking that we now expect from Ning.

My Grade 10 class (who have just done the Flat Classroom Project) are using Eduspaces. Here is their group and their members blog.

Then on December 19 (I missed this until today!) the announcement (followed by much discussion) that TakingITGlobal will be taking over Eduspaces. Yes! TakingITGlobal are a charitable organization based in Canada. Educators and others can join, blog, find others and it is very international and supportive of global collaborative projects! Here is my profile page on TIG.

Here is part of a message from the Director of Technology and Co-founder, Michael Furdyk, in response to the takeover of Eduspaces:
"For the last 4 years, TakingITGlobal has been working to develop programs around supporting educators at all levels in bringing together global issues, innovative practices, and education technology to make learning more effective and engaging. Personally, this has been a big commitment and passion for me - each year, I travel to a number of countries to keynote conferences and run PD workshops for educators at the K-12 and Post-Secondary level."

So, I can tell my classes we are OK to keep going with their Eduspaces blogs! Thank you TIGlobal!

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1 comment:

Intrepidflame said...

Hi Julie,

I am working over at ASD and I am very interested it speaking with you about some collaborative projects and staying connected here in Doha. I have finally started a professional blog

http://intrepidteacher.edublogs.org/

and you can find a link to my classroom blog, although it is a bit outdated. I hope to get my kids blogging really soon; we have had some issues with internet.

I found you on the flat class room...Please be in touch. I have added your blog to my Feeder, so I can keep up with your work.

ps Blogger won't let me leave a comment with my edublogger id, so I am using my personal blog is. Contact me through the IntrepidTeacher page.