Best+Practices+Showcase+Discussion

During the May 11th Eastside meeting there was a discussion about creating a collaborative environment where school leaders could share resources, best practices, ideas, etc. I would like to use this area to continue this discussion and see if we can bring this vision to fruition within the IDEAL learning platform, a partnership between ADE and ASU.

Several years ago there was a similar environment called the Arizona Learning Interchange. Remnants of this experiment can still be found at http://azli.asu.edu. In fact you can still find a large portion of the products created by Project Venture at AZLI. The mission of AZLI was to: "provides a place for educators to learn about succesful programs and share ideas and resources." AzLI was never fully utilized due to a variety of reasons: 1) the technology was not quite ready, 2) it was loosely tied to a vendor, and 3) as Janine said - the people in the field may not have be ready. All three of these factors are no longer an issue, and I agree that this is the time to explore the creation of an environment that will allow educators to share, "show off" and collaborate. There is no need to re-create the wheel all of the time, there is no reason to operate in isolation, there is no reason why we should not be able to access the resources from all of the technology grants (and others) from the past years.

If you are interested add your thoughts. I'll start with some general questions:

What materials could be included:
 * 1) resources created in statewide and federal grants
 * 2) curriculum materials

What features would be helpful:
 * 1) Bulletin board discussion
 * 2) Ability to create groups

If you would like to discuss this (or IDEAL in general) directly I can be reached at mark.nichols@asu.edu or 602.402.9975.