Tonight, we are proudly launching the debut of our first comprehensive online course. As I have mentioned publicly and personally to 3rd through 8th grade teachers, future online courses will likely look slightly different as this one as approximately 450 students enrolled, including all 3rd through 8th grade teachers, administrators, Learning Coaches, and iTech teachers. The number of students makes personal feedback from and contact with the teacher difficult to guarantee. Nevertheless, we hope that this is a great resource for supporting our effors with instruction, assessment, and the Web Gradebook as well as for learning about online courses for professional development.

This course is completely voluntary. Some important tips:

1. The online course is available all of the time.

2. Lessons and Tasks can be read and watched over and over again by teachers.

3. For this class, Lessons and Tasks can be completed in any order. Task 1 within a Lesson is not a prerequisite for Task 2. This allows teachers to cherry pick in order to meet his/her needs.

For our online courseware, we have evaluated a variety of products. We have set-up our very own Moodle server, but for now, we are moving forward with a local education technology start-up called SchoolTown.net. We have been working closely with SchoolTown’s leadership team since last spring, and they have made significant changes to their product as a result of our conversations and suggestions—right up through today. We look forward to continuing to shape this product through our experiences. (More information about SchoolTown, written by us, follows below.)

Again, we encourage you to take advantage of this course! Thank you for your great work in ensuring that our instruction is most effective to meet the needs of our students!!!

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SchoolTown.net is a new web-based service for schools and other groups to use. They are a local company, and despite its "start-up" status, they are developing significant connections within the educational community nation-wide.

Since they are a local company, we've been lucky enough to be working with SchoolTown.net since the spring of 2008. During that time, they have been very open to the feedback that we have provided, and they have continually made significant modifications to the structure of their products as well as to its features. We look forward to continuing to grow together in this area.

Originally conceived as a tool focused on student needs, we have also articulated how modifications to SchoolTown.net can serve us very well as a tool for online professional development. It is here that we begin our work with SchoolTown.net. From there, in the future, we look forward to also tackling the challenges of implementing SchoolTown.net as a tool that is used with students and parents.