Summary of Teaching Circle work so far

I haven't been doing much writing on this blog lately.  My major excuse is that I've been busy with my teaching circle.  So I think it's only natural that I blog a bit here about what I've been doing with the teaching circle.  Yes, I've been copying meeting minutes here, but what are my impressions after the first two meetings?  Well here they are:

Digital Writing TC: My Impressions after Meetings 1 and 2. 

For our first meeting, we met at a restaurant in downtown St. Paul.  Everyone seemed to like getting to know each other.  I did have one person who quit the group because she didn't want to meet face to face, but this was fine--I was over-enrolled in the group anyway.  Officially, as of this writing, I have nine colleagues in the group: four from Century College (including me), three from Inver Hills CC, one from St. Paul College, one from Normandale CC, and one from MNSU-Mankato.  During the first meeting, we set our group goal and decided that we'd do presentations of technologies that we've found and talk about how they might be helpful to our English students.  In between the first and second meetings, we talked via e-mail about the objectives that we'd need to achieve that group goal.  And we decided on four, in particular.  A few days before the second meeting, we had a "practice" WebEx meeting to see how the technology worked--it seemed to work pretty well.  The actual meeting, unfortunately, was a bit more troublesome.  Even though one colleague was able to complete her presentation on voice recognition software, one person who was supposed to present did not "show up," and the third presenter had computer problems.  So I had to fill in and give an impromptu presentation on Diigo--they seemed to appreciate this.  Our next meeting will be Friday, March 4, at 4 p.m.

I have also created a wiki for this group (http://digitalwritingtc.pbworks.com/) where we can share our information, esp. our technology info on the "technology table" that I created.  I do wish more people were contributing to the wiki, but hopefully this will change over time. 

I've also been having individual meetings with the TC members; so far, I've completed 5/9.  Mostly, they want to talk about their individual goals/objectives for the circle.  I've heard very few complaints or concerns thus far.

(An added bonus--I met with Lynda today, and she introduced me to a cool new link--http://join.me, which allows for collaboration/screen sharing.  Thanks Lynda!!)