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**Isteam Home Page** media type="custom" key="1668859" media type="custom" key="4141975"media type="custom" key="4717407" ** Our Puzzle of Practice... "How can I make effective use of** **Web 2.0 tools** **to strengthen teacher professional learning?"**
 * Welcome to the Isteam (In-service teacher educators at Massey) Wiki. **

2009 While the 'research' may be over now, Isteam has continued to meet and has in fact grown considerably, unlike most learning communities. We now use this wiki to maintain the focus (aka pressure) on improving our practice through the use of Web 2.0 tools to facilitate learning. We are branching out and employing more that just wikis this year but will be using our knowledge of wikis as a benchmark for other environments - cause we love them!

In 2008 this wiki was established as a research learning area. Feel free to read the Archive discussion to find out what happened. toc ** Our Puzzle of Practice... "What I can do to strengthen teacher learning through using online professional learning communities?"** This wiki was set up **as a communication tool** for the advisers at Ruawharo and Alyson McGee, our research support person (guru). In discussion with other online learning community researchers (Mandia Mentis - 2008, in publication), there is a clear trinity of aspects to a successful online learning community. These are the **context** within which it sits, the **pedagogy** underpinning it and the **technology** supporting it. All are inextricably intertwined and impact on each other. In reference to this, as our work evolves this year, the wiki will morph from it's early form as a pataka (store) for our tools and information **(context)** to help grow our research capabilities as advisers and consequently strengthen our practice. Although we **work on one site (context)** apart from Alyson, it is rare that we are all together so this site is a way of maintaining the communication. As our ** technical skills strenghten (technology) ** and our discussions start to challenge our thinking, I would also hope that we start sharing our thinking and practice so that the wiki becomes **a place for reflective thinking** **about the pedagogical practices** **(pedagogy)** sitting underneath our own work related wikis as well. This way we can practise what we are asking of teachers, and realise some of the issues this generates.

Page clues:

 * __Research__**
 * Discussion** - chat about what we are doing and finding with the PLG work. Low key and friendly, but this is the guts of this wiki.
 * Strategies -** as we discover the barriers to online (wiki) engagement, we list the strategies we have found that could be useful to overcome them
 * Analysis of wikis -** data showing the shifts in the ways teachers (and us) are using the wikispaces we've created
 * Presentation -** our planning for the presentation of this work to the Ministry of Education and our colleagues at Massey University
 * Journals -** our 'blogs' of musings - frustrations and success stories. these are now private.
 * Our wikis** - Links to each others' wikis and a place for us to make reflective comments about what is happening there. Most of these are closed communities.

Party Practice -** a sandpit page to learn how to create a fun environment around a party theme
 * __Support Stuff__
 * Meetings** - dates for meetings and copies of notes taken
 * Research tools** - a few strategies and tools that we used to help us collect data
 * Readings** - any useful material you find that you think we could benefit from in this research.
 * How to -** helpful hints about wikis as we've learned them
 * For beginners** - examples of applications of web2 environments - where to next
 * Questions and Answers** - if you're stuck, ask here.
 * Contacts** - please put up any contact details you are happy to share
 * Fred** - a play page to let you find out what you can do and need to learn. A sandpit