Thursday, January 1, 2009

LearningFront Online Learning Communities

Dear LearningFront Colleagues:

Welcome to the LearningFront blog! It's brand new and available for you to keep in touch with our efforts to launch and constantly improve our new and free online learning community, LearningFront™.

Why LearningFront? I created LearningFront™ to improve teaching and student learning worldwide. I wanted to build something that would help anyone who teaches -- parents, childcare providers, professionally certificated teachers, teacher educators, corporate trainers, home schoolteachers, professors, state department specialists, and so forth. And I wanted to connect all of these people so that they could help each other by developing and sharing new and better ways of teaching and learning.

Background! In 1997, my company launched a tool known as TaskBuilder. It was a floppy disk application that helped teachers to write performance-based lessons and assessment tasks to improve student achievement on classroom and high stakes tests. Over the years, we converted TaskBuilder into a web-based application know as TaskBuilderOnline™. In 2002, we launched eLearningTeacher. It's an online professional development application that's been used by individuals, schools, teacher education programs, and national organizations. As they emerged, I started using social and professional networking tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn and a variety of blogs and wikis to engage in new opportunities offered by the Web 2.0 collaborative environment.

Ah Hah! And then, I thought: "Why not build a free online learning community that integrates TaskBuilderOnline and eLearningTeacher with new networking and development tools for people dedicated to quality teaching and learning? This insight led me to collaborate with my colleague Mark Rosol to co-create and launch LearningFront -- a way to harness the knowledge, energy, and creativity of people throughout the world to advance the frontier of learning in a vast array of settings.

Getting Started! I invite you to sign-up for the free LearningFront™ online learning community to experience its power and potential. Please check back here from time to time to let us know your thoughts and suggestions for improvements.

Nick Hobar
President, LearningFront