About this website

This Teacher Education-Community Partnership website began with the realization that we needed a "scrapbook" to display all the ways our teacher education program works in partnership with the community, both local and global. Instead of keeping a paper scrapbook, we decided to create a website, and thus the "scrapbook" subcommittee was born. Members included Glenda Crawford, Judith Howard, Deborah Long, Janice Richardson, and Barbara Taylor.

We began in the fall of 2005 by brainstorming examples of partnerships; we used a graphic organizer created in Inspiration to help us generate ideas and organize them, ending up with the three categories of projects, programs, and scholarship.

We explored ways we could work collaboratively as a team and have joint authorship of content on the site, and we chose Contribute as the software that best met our needs because each of us could "contribute" content to the site. We took our graphic organizer to Elon multimedia developer, Jean-Paul Lavoie, who took our ideas and a few photos and created the beautiful homepage of the site and templates for project, program, and scholarship pages.

The scrapbook committee met every other week or so throughout the spring 2006 semester. It was not unlike a quilting bee. We each brought a laptop and chose content to work on at each meeting. We sat around and talked as we worked, sharing ideas and technical tips. Sometimes we added content on our own outside of our regular meeting times, but we found that committing time to meet and work together is what made it happen. We solicited input from colleagues and incorporated content they sent us, and this process continues as more partnerships are formed.

We hope you enjoy exploring the partnerships as much as we enjoyed creating the website.

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