Educational Applications Developer
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. Over time, several more applications were developed and integrated into the original BYOW plan:
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.
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The Portal Manager
The Portal Manager application was developed as an extension of the Build Your Own Website™ (BYOW) classroom content management system. Using the same "plug-in" approach as BYOW, the Portal Manager allowed individually "owned" teacher, student, and parent accounts to be networked into the school and/or district level. In addition to being a "point-and-click simplicity" content manager for the portal-level websites, it also provided more top-down control, many-to-many communication, aggregation of classroom content (which could be published to the school/district websites and/or shared with other classrooms), and data-mining ability.
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Strategic Partner Library
The Strategic Partner Library (SPL) is an online collaboration system that allows local organizations to create SCORM-compliant online educational and marketing material available for point-and-click inclusion on over 1500 local classroom Web sites. User-contributed collections of educational resources are classified by grade and subject, and aligned to the Ohio state content standards. Built with "point-and-click simplicity", the resource builders allow members of the local education community (teachers, museum staff, educational resource specialists, etc.) to create web-based content for classroom use. End users (students and teachers) can download files, watch video, add the resource to their personal libraries, publish the material to individual websites and/or blogs, and contact the content creators with questions or requests for follow-up material. Built with a celluar design, the Strategic Partner Library is actually composed of many libraries which have been networked together. This model allows schools, districts, or educational project managers to link their localized and/or thematic libraries with the wider educational community.
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Data Driven Decisions for Academic Achievement (D3A2)
As Build Your Own Website™, the Portal Manager, and the Strategic Partner Library began to be included in statewide educational progjects, we become aware of a new Ohio Department of Education intiative called Data Driven Decisions for Academic Achievement (D3A2). After meeting with the project managers and developers, WGTE determined that linking the D3A2 business tools into the Strategic Partner Library would enable Build Your Own Website™ users to employ a far greater number of resources in their online classroom and provide valuable feedback into the D3A2 Individual Student Assesment system.
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The Virtual Museum
The Virtual Museum web application was a specialized content management system designed for the development of fully self-administered, interactive virtual museums and exhibits. The project was inspired by the success of the Build Your Own Website™ system and an opportunity to support the University of Toledo's award-winning Toledo's Attic website.
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