August 2007 — News
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L3RN: Seattle Public Schools Brings Social Networking In House
Training wasn't a challenge, Pierson said, especially for the students. "The kids just stick to it immediately," she said. Although training initially focused on a select handful of teachers from elementary, middle and high schools, who then introduced the software to their students, the project has grown organically from there. After initial training by teachers, Pierson said, "the kids turned around and started showing other kids and other teachers how to use the tool." Teachers who weren't trained initially have also seized on it, experimenting, participating, and uploading their work. "Even with school closed," Pierson said, "teachers are still using at it. It's been a wonderful experience for teachers and students."
Although the exchange of quantities of video content between schools can take up large amounts of bandwidth, Pierson said that hasn't been a problem, at least yet. "We were concerned about the bandwidth," Pierson said, "but we wrote some tools to make sure that [video content] could stream through very narrow bandwidth."
One advantage of being in the city that spawned high-tech giants like Microsoft is having a vast talent pool to hire from. That can also be a downside, Pierson said, because competition for top developers is fierce. All of the L3RN system has been built in house, and the entire system is open source. That has appealed to talented developers interested in essentially donating a few years of their career toward working on an educational project of this scope and scale, Pierson said, and has helped keep costs down.
Security and Non-Public Data
While L3RN's easy to use multimedia aspects are a draw, the site also serves other purposes, such as storing secured information on each student's progress toward graduation. With a click of a button, students--or their parents--can view personal data. "If they're trying to create a project to meet graduation requirements and they want to see how they're doing," Pierson said, "they can just tab over it and they can get all of their personal data."
Although outsiders can view a public face of the site at www.L3RN.com, that's only a small sampling of what's happening on the actual site. There's a vast private area is reserved for Seattle Public School students, teachers, parents, and staff. "We have a lot of content on the inside," Pierson explained. "We have projects going on that we can't put on the outside [site] because we don't have parent permission to show pictures [and the work] of those students. We have thousands of content pieces locked inside."
L3RN is just one piece of a large, entirely open-source software project that Seattle Public Schools is building. It will eventually tie in other pieces, such as a data warehouse and online enrollment tool. In Pierson's vision, parents will be able to log in to check their child's grades, attendance, homework, test scores, and more. In addition, the district may eventually come up with a way to share L3RN with other schools, both within the United States and worldwide.
