Educational Web Applications
The success of Inquire Ohio made it clear that there was enthusiam within the educational community for a more classroom-centric approach to online outreach. Top-down web applications like Blackboard were becoming more widely adopted, but were designed from a school/district administrative perspective. After a series of focus group meetings with teachers, parents, and students, I designed and developed WGTE's Build Your Own Website™ (BYOW) content management system.
Overview of Build Your Own Website™
At the core of Build Your Own Website™ was the Online Classroom, a series of templates targeted for specific, classroom-oriented tasks. As a rule, all additions to the Online Classroom were required to pass a "point-and-click simplicity" rule in order to maintain a very
small learning curve. The number and types of templates steadily increased over time, and included such things as calendars, photo galleries,
online quizzes, blogs, student "lockers" (for draft and archived materials), discussion boards, and much more.
All tools were originally available to both teachers and students (with certain restrictions), but we quickly adapted the system to recognize unique "teacher" and "student" accounts. Teacher accounts now included the ability to create lesson plans and other instructional content via the "resource builders". It also allowed teachers to provide direct assistance to individual students (such as individual action plans), keep notes, and, eventually, interact with parents. The student accounts were "owned" by the student and could be carried from year to year by "plugging into" individual classroom accounts. With a few modifications, the student lockers became a student's personal academic archive and included the ability to publish an online portfolio. All student publishing tools included an optional approval process, controlled by the teacher (and later the parent and/or the school/disctrict.)
As WGTE Public Media began developing more websites and applications for educational non-profits, the Strategic Partner Library was formed. In essence, an educational institution could create classroom content from within their own website CMS and "promote" the content to the SPL. Schools, teachers, and students could then search for and utlize this content within their BYOW accounts. A Content Standards Wizard was added later,
allowing content-builders to apply Ohio state content standards to their material with "point-and-click simplicity". Local museums, science centers, zoos, and others were now an integral part of the classroom. The Strategic Partner Library also contained an API that allowed other educational resource libraries (such as Data Driven Decisions for Academic Achievement - D3A2) to plug into Build Your Own Website™.
The Portal Manager "collected" classroom accounts in the same "plug-in" manner as classroom accounts collected student accounts. This provided more control, aggregation of classroom content (which could be published to the school/district websites and/or shared with other classrooms), and data-mining ability.
A later extension of the resource builders made it possible for approved community experts to add content to the SPL and/or be available as a resource for students. Every community has a number of retired professionals with real-world experience and extra time. The Experts Connection allowed classrooms to mine these resources and make the educational process even more of a community effort. Students could enter questions (classified by subject) into the Expert Connection and it would be matched to the best available local experts. The volunteers would receive an alert (using an Internet Explorer toolbar extension) and could answer back (including resources, if desired) to the classroom.
Due to the success of Build Your Own Website™, I was invited three times to speak at the Ohio Statewide Technology Conference held annually at Ohio State. The subjects were Virtual Communities, Peer-to-Peer Educational Networking, and Building Your Own Website. Throughout my time at WGTE Public Media I was also regularly involved in teaching professional development and writing user and technical manuals for these products.
Crystal Award for Excellence
Invitation to PBS Academy
