From The New School Outreach Program to The Global Outreach Program
When I started volunteering for The New School Outreach program we were given free space at the university for a community-based program. Little did we know that the pandemic would upend that, forcing us online, and then eventually to close. The director of the program did not quit however and rebuilt the program with my help. It now is on hiatus seeking funding, but more good things are likely to come.
Note: To protect students' privacy, these are images of sites only and not links to the actual sites.
I built over six sites for this program: one for each level of the class and then a training site for all of the teachers to use for orientation and collaboration.
Note: To protect students' privacy, these are images of sites only and not links to the actual sites.
Using Google sites' features I was able to add hidden roster pages along with places for assessment that studetns could not access, but teachers and administrators could.
The sites allow for easy archiving of previous work and let more than one teacher share a class or build on previous work.
The teacher hub that I designed contained all of the resources a new or returning teacher could need for the class. It was also protected by a Google sign in feature, ensuring the materials remained within the online school.
The resulting student work was always phenomenal, with one class presenting English Language podcasts that they had recorded and edited all semester long! (Please email me if interested in listening and to obtain student consent).
This program was the culmination of my work as a designer of class websites, and it allowed me to not only teach using sites, but to administer a whole slate of them for more than one class and level simultaneously. The program also used WhatsApp and Zoom to keep things running, but the core of each class was a Google site that I designed and then each level's teacher maintained. This was the only way we were able to operate during the pandemic and in the months afterward, when students were scattered back to their home countries and the program became truly global in scale.