I just got back from Atlanta, Georgia, where I went to my first National Educational Computing Conference with FableVision!

There were plenty of highlights, but my favorite part was speaking with teachers who introduced me to new “North Star” inspired lesson plans. One teacher told me about making North Star Constellations the first day of class, and asking students to introduce different topics over the course of the year, based on their interests. (So, to introduce a unit on wildlife, the student who wrote “birds” on his or her constellation might introduce it by sharing some information with the rest of the class).

I want to continue the discussion. What’s your favorite North Star resource? What would you like to add as a North Star resource?

Welcome, and in many cases, welcome back to the North Star Community. It is our sincere hope that all of our guests share the vision for this community, and get involved to help shape and grow the community and the vision going forward. To this end, I thought I’d share our approach and goals for this new version of the North Star Community.

Open Ended ‘Discussion’ Content. As you may have noticed, we have reconstructed the site using a customized “blog” format (Wordpress, for those interested). Most of the content of the site will be in the traditional ‘post’ format, where an author can create some original content and put it up for others to read, and ‘discuss’ through the comments.
Committed, Engaged Members. The community is open, anyone can visit the site without logging in. But to participate at any level (and we hope you will!) visitors must register and log in. Anyone can register, and anyone can add comments to any discussion. Your first comment will be ‘moderated’ (to be sure you are not a spam-bot), and after that your comments will appear immediately on the site. Active participants in conversations can themselves begin to post original discussions, as ‘authors’ of posts. If you’d like to post original content, please just contact us at our ‘info@’ inbox for this site. Who knows, submit enough comments and we may approach you!

Thoughtful, ‘Organic’ Growth. As the site grows we will contstantly evaluate the functionality we need, and the pieces we will add. We’ll create new categories as needed. We’ll post media as we develop/find/receive it. We invite you, either using the comments section of this very post, through email to our info@ account, or by becoming an author and posting in this category, to tell us what you’d like to see.

Thanks everyone, for being a part of our community.

-Doug and the North Star Community Development Team