Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The Power of Project Share

Project Share is providing and excellent platform for a community of educators and students to connect, collaborate, research, and create content. Unlike other course management systems, project share gives educators the ability to network with other public school entities across the state and is creating a systemic approach. Teachers and students in our district have the ability to access content in a mobile environment that includes productivity, web 2.0, and custom tools. Google Apps for Education serve as a great resource for collaborative work groups but fails to offer a true course management system. Moodle lacks the ability for educators to connect and share with other schools on a similar platform. In addition, it is hard for an educator to find extra hours in the day to actually build a moodle content. It is nice to have a free resource to tap into that is a ready made course management system that is similar to what other districts and schools utilize in the state. Want to utilize an existing web 2.0 tool? Project share gives educators the ability to add a custom tool menu to embed other tools and third party websites inside a course.

The power of project share is that it also connects Texas to the global network of Epsilen. Another powerful set of tools available to educators includes a fantastic lesson plan system allows for educators to tap into NYT resources, The University of Texas McDonald Observatory online content repository, and PBS digital library. Project Share resources and collaborative pieces will save our teachers time, district travel expenses, and professional development resources.

System issues with Epsilen do exist and hopefully system engineers will continue to address bandwidth issues. However, project share serves as a the best solution to provide a unified effort in addressing a real need, a systemic approach to 21st century learning.

Would you like to see project share in action? Dublin ISD would love to collaborate and welcomes you to visit our wonderful small community. All students 7-12 grade access all courses using Project Share, and all teachers participate in PLN utilizing the project share platform. To learn more, please join our Connections Grant Group in Project Share.

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