Teaching Assistants Community December 16, 2005
Posted by Andy Roberts in : tools , trackbackCarole Tonner, who runs a message board for Teaching Assistants in the Middlesbrough region, mentions that IT is an area in which they would like more training. My own observations are that nearly everybody is using the net for private email, checking out travel information, holidays and online purchases these days. But finding your way back to a web-based bulletin board can be awkward and time-consuming, especially of you’re not on your own computer, and if you go to all that trouble only to find there are no new messages then that deters anybody a little bit from bothering again another time.
Email on the other hand, comes to you whenever you log in to your account, so once you’re subscribed to a group you stay subscribed even if there are no messages for a period. When it comes to life again, everybody is still there.
So what would it take to get an active online group of, for example Teaching Assistants in the UK, together?
Well the first thing to do would be to check throughly that there isn’t one already established. Where on the internet do TAs discuss TA related issues at the moment if at all?
Then start collecting email addresses of anybody who is interested and maybe send the occasional email with a multiple To: list to let them know you’re about to start up an email group. Anybody who complains about being ‘flooded’ can be dropped off immediately to save having to unsubscribe them later.
For the group email service, choose one from yahoogroups, googlegroups, or maybe another and famiarise youself with the settings before adding your members in. In particular, make sure the default for replies is set to “group” and that there’s a short subject tag ( usually an abbreviation of the group name in square brackets ) added to each message. If possible, a footer telling people how to unsubscribe is a good idea too.
Now start adding in your initial core membership, however small, and publicising your group. Use offline publicity as well as online, like noticeboards, phone calls, word of mouth etc but the difficulty here is making sure the URL for the group gets spelled out correctly, just like when somebody tells you their email address. Online publicity is going to mean leaving unintrusive messages on any related forums, posting with a URL in your sig, and maybe setting up a basic web page somewhere that explains a bit about the group and how to join. You never know, that might develop into a ’shared artefact’ one day.
Technorati Tags: TA, online_community, email, yahoogroups, googlegroups
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