As part of BaW10, we had a guided tour of TappedIn. It is a place where “K-12 teachers, librarians, administrators, and professional development staff, as well as university faculty, students, and researchers gather [here] to learn, . . . → Read More: Review: Tapped In]]>

As part of BaW10, we had a guided tour of TappedIn. It is a place where “K-12 teachers, librarians, administrators, and professional development staff, as well as university faculty, students, and researchers gather [here] to learn, collaborate, share, and support one another“.

In short, an online community dedicated to education.  It has been around for quite a while (copyright 1995), so I think we could consider it a precursor of networking sites such as Ning.  TappedIn has two main advantages:

1) It functions as a place to connect with other colleagues through joining the different groups and communities available. For example, I have joined:

ESL in Second Life             Emerging Technology            Technology in Education          Teaching with the Web K-12

2) It allows anybody who signs up to have their own “office”, with the following features:

• A live chat (in order to use it your students need to have an account too)
• A welcome portal where visitors to the office can see information you make available.
• A place to upload files, such as activities, reading materials, etc.
• A links section, for you to select websites of interest to your students.
• A whiteboard where you can write down things while chatting. Your students can write on it too.

To learn more about it, here’s a video tutorial, courtesy of sbrunvan through YouTube: