User group. For some reason, those two words put together have always sounded somewhat scary to me – almost as if they were too extremely technical for even me to fully appreciate. But while I’ve come to find that some are quite technical in nature, they aren’t at all scary, and are often extremely helpful!
So what is a User group? Wikipedia says that it is “a type of club focused on the use of a particular technology, usually (but not always) computer-related.” User group members usually get together for periodic meetings, conferences, lectures, etc… The purpose of a User group meeting is usually to learn something new (often technology-related) or to discuss current topics (usually also technology-related).
A few years ago, I learned about a user group called ITUGDE, which stands for Instructional Technology Users Group Delaware. This group is facilitated by Wendy Modzelewski of the Delaware Center for Educational Technology (DCET) The mission of ITUGDE is to “facilitate the sharing of information and resources related to instructional technology to empower PreK-16 educators to enhance teaching and learning.”
When I originally heard about ITUGDE, I heard about their e-mail list (also known as a LISTSERV) – a colleague had mentioned that this was a great list to belong to because there were many tech savvy educators on it that you could access all at once simply by sending an e-mail. Think about the possibilities with this! Have a tech-related question with no one to ask? If you belong to ITUGDE, you have over 300 members (according to their website) to reach out to!
Once you’ve joined (and you can do so by going to this webpage to sign up), you will receive email messages in your inbox when members send a message to the group. I’ve found the group to be pretty quiet (meaning not many e-mails coming in) during the summer time which makes sense given that most educators are not working then. You can reply to messages simply by clicking “reply” as you normally would to an e-mail. Keep in mind that when you reply, this goes to the entire list of members. So if you have something you want to say to just one individual (perhaps the original author of the post), you might want to change the reply address to just them specifically.
