Jennifer Bergland (TCEA Political Advocate) asks in this comment:

I’m interested in your ideas as to how we could use technology to gather input on our advocacy initiatives. New Mexico uses a wiki. http://nmste.wikispaces.com/Advocacy

A possible response: Why not adapt the idea I wrote about below for TCEA? Instead of opentea.org it would be opentcea.org ?

Breaking news story about OpenTexasEducationAgency (OpenTEA.org) in Fantasy, Texas:

The prospect of clicking your way through cluttered, confusing, cascading pages of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) web site to find information about old, new and upcoming initiatives is enough to make any concerned educator give up before even starting. With OpenTEA.org, we’re working to make it easy for anyone to find the exact information they want about every letter to “the administrator addressed,” grants and updates, and much more.

1. OpenTEA grants pages bring together grant coverage, blog buzz, insightful comments and more. TEA is complex, so see what’s rated “most helpful” by the community.

2. Linking to OpenTEA gives educators access to the big picture as well as the official details. If you write a blog post about a TEA program and include the official title, then a link to your blog post will appear on that TEA Program web page.

3. OpenTEA makes it easy to access the most-viewed web pages at TEA, or hot programs/grants by issue area.

4. OpenTEA pages have one-click sharing to Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, email a friend, and much more.

5. OpenTEA helps you track all the actions by your favorite program directors and what people are saying about those programs. Subscribe to RSS feeds to stay in touch with their latest changes and community comments.
Source: Miguel’s Imagination after remixing OpenCongress.org’s web site

If you’ve ever used the Texas Education Agency web site, then you know how difficult it can be to find stuff on it. I’ve sometimes wondered if the search page is even connected to the current web site, and I’ve longed for RSS subscription. Until last week at the Texas CTO Clinic 2008, I thought I was the only one who had problems with the site. That was until both Representatives Scott and Rob slammed the TEA web site as difficult to navigate. One of the suggestions Mark Strama made at that time is, start a wiki “to house best pedagogical practices, instructional content that we say what every kid must learn?” Mark when on to say:

What if we created a wiki that allowed you guys to share this stuff with each other, that had a good way to rate content? Make it easy to search, use, etc….you’re not going to do a lot of things. The practical utility of a wiki that makes lesson planning, reduces workload for a teacher…at a modest investment, the State could create and unleash the thousands of flowers blooming.

In fact, Scott Hochberg said the following:

That info may be on the TEA web site but is impossible to find.

Maybe, OpenTEA.org could also accomplish what Rob Eissler points out:

• Recognize best practices and district
• Reward them
• Repair those that aren’t performing

Now, I truly appreciate the hard work TEA folks are doing in their re-modelled web site, but I wonder if they might not consider switching to a format like the one in use by OpenCongress.org (which, you may notice, I stole the idea for the fake news release above).

Even if the Texas Education Agency (TEA) doesn’t consider this a worthy venture–after all, they’re under-staffed, over-worked, and woefully underpaid–maybe Texas educators should consider launching the OpenTEA.org web site?

Or, to put it in Mark Strama’s words with slight modification, What if we [Texas educators] created a wiki that allowed us to share stuff with each other?

Any large state-wide organizations–like the Texas Computer Education Association or the Texas CTO Group–interested in doing this? I’d certainly like to contribute!

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