Her principal told librarian/technologist Laura Fleming “I don’t care how you do it, but build a system for training Web 2.0 skills to the faculty”. The rest is history. Laura created a library of instruction and practice tools, and has now shared them with the world. She purposefully holds the actual instruction videos to under five minutes and has created a digital badge system that encourages the teachers to “do something” immediately that they can use in their classroom.
Laura told me that she created the system for teachers at her own school, New Milford High School in New Jersey, but as soon as she Tweeted it out, she had hundreds of emails from others who wanted to know how and what she was doing. She decided to make the entire system public and now has a couple of thousand users from all over the world. She shares her files but encourages others to “customize a more personalized experience for your own teachers and your school’s brand”.
I also talked to Laura about her pilot using Proton Media‘s ProtoSphere 3D virtual collaboration space with students. While right now this is a capability that is largely used by large corporate enterprises, I am looking to the future when this functionality allows us to discard our idea that a classroom is a bounded space.
Check out Laura’s site; I think you will find a lot of leading edge thinking and resources there.
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