Starting Year Two

And... I'm off! I've started this blog to document (internally for now) my own view of the progress of DreamYard's Learning Portfolio Project, which we are doing in partnership with Parsons the New School for Design.

So far this year, we are off to a great start. We found out about the grant in June and had our first Design Team meeting in July with most of the returning educators from DYPrep and the Art Center. We were happy to find that all the educators who completed last year's pilot wanted to return this year as Mentor Educators. Our Design Team meeting in July oriented the returning educators to our plan for the next two years and got us inspired to spread this project to more educators and students.

We've also had two Orientation calls for new educators (the returning educators joined as well) in July and August. We had to have two calls because the Art Center educators and DYPrep educators had very different summer schedules. (#challenge!!)  We laid out a lot of information for everyone - and also sent out an Orientation packet - and all seem on board and ready to go. Rudy is taking the lead at DYPrep to set up the calendars, tech and training. Here at the Art Center we have a smaller team that I'm heading up. Our first DYPrep meeting is today and our first Art Center meeting is next week. Parsons already had their kick off with their faculty. AND, Anna from the Open Portfolio Project, is coming for a visit next week. Oh and did I mentioned I talked about the project at the Arts Ed Tech panel Hive put on and Rudy published an article on getting started with portfolios and blogging on EdSurge?

I'm starting this blog for two reasons: to stay on top of how Blogger works and also to add to my process of working "Open."  More soon!