The two Graduate Schools of Education at Portland State University (PSU) and the University of Oregon (UO) will work together to re-program an existing web application and curriculum development archive/database to support the development of a “YouTube” like online community for teachers who wish to create, assess and share their original curriculum.
The web application we will be adapting was originally produced at PSU for a federally funded program entitled ARTSplash. (www.artsplash.pdx.edu) ARTSplash is an arts integration training program for generalist, in-service teachers. The training culminates in the creation of standards based curriculum of the teacher’s own design. This curriculum is contributed to the ARTSplash archive/website using a set of web tools that require no more technical knowledge than is needed to send an email and use a mouse and keyboard. The ARTSplash database already contains much of the functionality we need to create a moderated version of a “YouTube”-like online community. It would take a minimal amount of additional programming to expand its capacity to serve more teachers…from different school districts and geographical regions.
In its current form, the database’s authentication process limits its affective input/output to only one group of institutional users at a time. We would use the NWACC funding to re-design the web tools and database so it can differentiate between two or more groups drawing data from a shared database. We also want to make it possible for multiple users to “brand” their data so that a user could look at all the materials in the database as well as only those materials that are contributed by their institution. Additionally, we would like the institutional users to have some latitude about how their “tributary” of the site looks.