NSTA_Follow-up

**Follow-up to the NSTA - Research Dissemination Conference** Dear Workshop Attendees:

Thank you for taking time from your busy schedules to attend the NASA-sponsored Classroom of the Future workshop called, Adding Value to Instruction with Strategic Use of Online Collaboratives. We enjoyed having the opportunity to interact with two different groups of outstanding educators.

The workshops used our [|Exploring Global Climate Change Through Problem-based Learning] as the context to focus discussions about processes and tools needed to facilitate computer-supported collaboration. In preparing for the workshop, we found that we wanted to work beyond theNASATalk Joomla!-based content management system[1], so we integrated a wiki website to be able to quickly make available content and resources that were mostly in development. The wiki format provided additional flexibility for synchronous discussion notes and sharing.

In follow-up to the workshop, we invite all participants to: 1. View an abbreviated summary of your responses to the Online Virtual Collaborative Community Rubric survey (See WORD file attached, or access online); 2. Continue the feedback and sharing of related resources that were used during the workshop (Link to NASATalk article with hyperlinks to all resources used); 3. Contact us by email if you would like to set up a blog on [|NASATalk] to feature upcoming STEM education opportunities and events initiated by your project or association; 4. Consider signing up to be one of the ETE classroom pilot testers; contact us by email if you are interested; and 5. Share further comments about the workshop and resources provided by completing an online NASA Office of Education Performance Measure Short Term Experience - Educator End of Event Survey.

My colleagues, Dr. Debbie Piecka and Manetta Calinger, and I look forward to hearing from you on [|NASATalk], or on our ETE-PBL wiki. Please feel free to email us anytime with questions, suggestions, and resources to share with the group.

Best wishes, Laurie F. Ruberg, Ph.D. Associate Director, Center for Educational Technologies Wheeling Jesuit University 316 Washington Avenue, Wheeling, WV 26003 _____ [1] Joomla! is a free and open source content management system (CMS) for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets. It comprises a model–view–controller (MVC) Web application framework that can also be used independently. Joomla! is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and software design patterns, stores data in a MySQL database, and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization. There are more than 6,000 free and commercial plug-ins available from the official Joomla! Extension Directory. (This description adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joomla) Read more about Joomla at: http://docs.joomla.org/Main_Page.