Scot's+2010+Project+Proposal

Introduction
The Christian School Leadership (CSL) Program is a project of the School of Education and the Mentoring Institute at George Fox University. Through a three-year grant provided by the M.J. Murdock Trust, the CSL Program delivers mentoring, induction and professional development services to administrators and teachers working in PK-12 Christian Schools in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. We are just completing the second year of the program, with participants from about 25 schools. Primary activities supported by the program include mentoring of new and veteran school administrators, mentoring and coaching of teachers, department heads and other teacher-leaders and targeted professional development activities based on specific school needs. Scot Headley serves as the co-director of the CSL program. Dr. Gary Kilburg, the Director of the Mentoring Institute at George Fox also serves as co-director of the program.

Due to the dispersed nature of the schools served by the program and the relative geographic isolation of local Christian schools, one guiding principle of the service philosophy of the CSL program is to deliver services and support educators through distance using telecommunications and internet-based means. During the life of the program, we have used iVocalize, a computer conferencing tool, and Moodle, a course management system, as well as Skype, email and telephone as primary tools for communication, information sharing and instruction in this program.

Proposal

During the summer of 2010, I will be working with Gary Kilburg and Marie Balance (providing administrative support for the CSL Program) on testing the use of Second Life and Google Groups for communication and information sharing for the CSL program. This phase will include inviting a small group of participants to test the use of the technologies to complete several tasks related to the program in order to determine the feasibility of actually using the applications in a broader manner during the 2010/2011 school year. Specific factors to be evaluated are the ease of use of the media by participants, technological problems encountered, time spent on task, reaction of the participants to the use of the media and the actual completion of the assigned tasks. The following two EDFL 675 course objectives will be supported by this project: I will describe our work in my wiki-based journal and will complete the reporting of the project by writing a brief summary and reflective paper to be shared with EDFL 675 participants, in addition to sharing in a live conference.
 * Investigate the technological tools that enable the networked world.
 * Describe and analyze the cultural and spiritual implications of electronic networks