Mar 5

Written by: shines-2
3/5/2010 7:48 PM 

Earlier this week I attended a meeting where Project Share was discussed and demonstrated. If TEA delivers the goods, as introduced, it may solve many technology problems for Texas school districts. Project Share is supposed to be a free eLearning portal for Texas school teachers, administrators and students. It is portrayed as a portal to free resources that include the entire New York Times archives, secure wikis, ePortfolios for students and teachers, social networking application that resembles a Ning for creating Personal Learning Communities with resources for all content areas, including Career and Technical Education and College and Career Readiness Standards. It is supposed to have an area where teachers can participate in online staff development and create online courses for their students. Teachers and students will be able to access 21st Century digital content, collaborate and learn together. I'm not sure how long TEA has been working on this, but it is supposed to be available, to some extent in the Spring of 2010 with training beginning this summer. TxVSN (Texas Virtual School Network) is a calalog for free online courses for Texas high school students. I wonder if TxVSN will part of Project Share. I look forward to seeing if TEA is able to deliver on this ambitious endeaver.

I don't know how many servers it will take to hold all the data from Texas school teachers and students, but the data load has to be massive.

With Project Share, school districts might no need to worry about finding safe resources and deciding what web sites to allow students to access. They can just provide access to Project Share. The online course area might take the place of Moodle, an open source content management system for online courses, which would save time and server spaces for school districts, if it is robust enough.

Project Share will not be able to take the place of everything that teachers and students use in the classroom and I would not want to be restricted from using anything else in my classroom, but TEA is making an attempt to provide the basics and little more all in one free package.

Project Share is a joint effort between the Texas Education Agency, Epsilen LLC, and The New York Time.

See a demo of Project Share at http://tea.epsilen.com/Public/Demo.aspx