TPSConnect
Teaching with Primary Sources-Colorado
-Taylor Kendal
-Keith Patterson
Educational Outreach for Teachers 

Professional Development

Creating a network of teachers who advocate teaching with primary sources

http://www.loc.gov
http://www.mscd.edu/tps
How do you Interact?
Needed to build a community
And learned a few things along the way
Needed to find a better solution...
Needs Analysis
Empower the User
Needed to work with existing systems
Needed to work other inititives
Audience Analysis
Teachers K-16
Interest in TPS Program
Content to the point and easy to access
Newbie friendly
Set out to find what tools fit our needs
Look at analysis and create goals and objectives for the project
NEEDS
Finding the Right Tools
Blog
Wiki
http://blog.tpsconnect.org/
http://psi21.pbworks.com/
Learning Community
Choosing a System
Existing Systems
Blackboard, Blog, Wiki
Difficult user experience
Hard to administer
Wouldn't work with existing
Build our own
Ground up development
Long timeline
Difficult Development
Open Source System
(Drupal, Joomla)
http://www.opensourcecms.com
Mature Development
Flexible
Extendable – Hundreds of Applications
Buy a System
(Ning)
Lack of Control
Cost
Joomla won out
http://www.joomla.org
Joomla
Online GUI
Code-free
Modular Extensions
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions
http://tpsconnect.org
http://tpsconnect.org/administrator