Educational Technology Consultant from Bangalore, India: educatorslog.in. Shuchi is talking about building online communities in India.

Shuchi discusses teaching in India…Indian schools are silos. Educator communities are few and far between. Blogging was an answer, but it also is a single medium of communication. Some teachers don’t participate. This doesn’t mean 21st century skills are talked about, but infrastructure hasn’t been presence. Global online resources were not necessarily applicable to Indian schools. Language is a barrier, but there are still hundreds of thousands of English speaking educators.

Mindmapping provided needs, features, barriers, and led to a vision for the creation of the online community. Implementation started with a small beta audience. Shuchi admits it is still difficult to get participation. She pays particular attention to the language of the site, for example, interchanging Topics and Tags as a header. Usage data is provided by by Google Analytics and site surveys.

Overall, the site is being used, but only by a small percentage of the educators. She is listening to the feedback and continuing development.

Btw, Shuchi likes to use the open source mind-mapping program: Freemind. Her online community is developed on Drupal.