My Service Learning Project

For my service learning project, I created a website called The Scoop for my fellow faculty members at Shoreline Community College. This site is intended to give the parent education faculty an opportunity to connect and collaborate with each other.

Our faculty consists of 22 instructors who teach at seven different cooperative preschool sites in the Seattle area. As parent education instructors, we teach both adult learners and preschool children. Our staff meets every other month to share ideas and connect with each other.

This past January, our staff attended our annual faculty retreat. During this retreat, we were trained in The Nurtured Heart Approach. While the training was informative and helpful, we have not had a chance to share our experiences as we use this approach in our classrooms. The website, The Scoop, is intended to be a place where we can gather and share our experiences between staff meetings and training. I began with using our shared training with The Nurtured Heart Approach to give us a beginning topic of conversation. I also made our site private to create a comfortable and safe place for faculty members to share ideas.

In thinking of how best to use connected teaching and learning to bring my faculty together, I used Padlet and Flipgrid as platforms to create collaboration. The faculty seemed to like interacting with Padlet as it allowed us to brainstorm ideas and save them for a later date. While the faculty stated they enjoyed watching my Flipgrid videos that shared my experiences with The Nurtured Heart Approach, they did not want to create their own video responses. My hope was that videos would substitute for the time we spend together in faculty meetings, but it seems the faculty preferred Padlet, which allows for more writing-style brainstorming.

I think the website has the potential to be a great way for the faculty to connect and share ideas with each other. Since our in-person time is limited, this site allows us to connect with each other more frequently and easily than we could with faculty meetings alone.