Creativing

Module 1, Collaborative Communities

Happy Birthday, America! I'm glad to be having this reflective time on our nation's birthday. I'm so proud of our ability to grow as a community based on our living document, the U.S. Constitution.

I'm grateful for this course, Online Classroom: Creating Collaborative Communities, and for its timing! I'm looking forward to gaining expertise on how to facilitate a close-knit community in my own school that I'm creating online, The Home School. This school in its manifestation will be made up of children and adults who have been on their own individual journeys of emotional healing; being at this online school will give everyone an opportunity to join their journeys together within our online community. In my last class I started having a lot of questions about how to create such a community and then I learned I would probably be able to answer those questions in this course!

We will use the Home School's discussion board, called the Safety Net, to stay in touch and build community and just be there for each other. For my final project in Assessment I created this safe haven school, The Home School. Then, in my Instructional Design class I created a mini-course called Emotional Healing Within a Supportive Online Community.

This is the very first course every student at The Home School takes because it's the basis of the support group they create within their online community while they are at The Home School. It's about learning to communicate together through creating a socially and emotionally safe online community. The students taking this 5-week course learn about Social-Emotional Learning and Netiquette (online etiquette) and how to navigate a Course Management System (the computer program that delivers the online learning), but most of all they learn to build an emotionally and socially safe online community together.

Here's a new word: Creativing. It means, the act in gerund form of being creative!

I am looking forward to filling in the gaps of my own understanding through Creativing Collaborative Communities.