Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School Information

LearningFront is committed to achieving the vision of:"Advancing the frontier of learning through online learning communities!"The LearningFront frontier is the outer edge of current ways of teaching and learning. It's where teaching and learning evolve into new and better ways of learning by connecting people, teaching, and technology. How children, youth, and adults learn in the 21st century is the key to their success. Our mission is to help you connect with people and tools to learn, create, and share your ideas and resources to meet the learning expectations of the 21st century. Who are LearningFront members? LearningFront welcomes and facilitates collaboration, information sharing, and problem solving among public, independent, charter, virtual, and home school teachers and administrators; college and university faculty and administrators; corporate leaders, managers, and trainers; professional organization specialists, government personnel, online educators; and individuals interested in becoming teachers -- anywhere, anytime. Adults aged 18 and above may sign-up to become members of the LearningFront online community. Members are encouraged to invite other adults to become LearningFront members. Then, members can invite and accept each other as colleagues and share profiles. Both members and colleagues can join teams to collaborate on topics of interest or needs related to teaching and learning. What are LearningFront's unique features? LearningFront is unique because it combines social and professional networking with web-based development tools for teaching and learning any subject, with any person, anytime, anywhere with a computer connected to the Internet. It helps members and teams to learn, develop, co-create, mash and remix, and share on demand. For example, using LearningFront's tools for instant messaging, member and team messages, WikiTask™, TaskBuilderOnline™, and eLearningTeacher™:A home school teacher might form a team with other home school teachers throughout the nation to co-create and share effective teaching strategies for grade three mathematics and complete online professional development programs to improve their mathematics assessments. A middle school sixth grade team might collaborate with a feeder elementary school fifth grade team on planning data-driven lessons and, then, post their results in WikiTask™ to serve as prototypes for other LearningFront members in their district and worldwide. A high school department chairperson might identify priority content standards for an instructional unit, clone them to teachers requesting lessons co-created to achieve the standards, and, then, WikiTask™ the lessons with the most promise for worldwide application. A principal might create a team of other principals to exchange messages about the month-to-month tasks needed to implement an instructional improvement strategy to increase student achievement. Then, they could clone best practices and effective lessons from their teachers to each other to act as prototypes for instructional improvement. Student teachers might develop standards-based lessons for their classes and clone them to their supervising teacher and teacher education coordinator prior to their observation of the lessons for insights and improvements. And, then, the supervisors could clone their coaching tips back to the student teachers. A corporate trainer might collaborate with a team of developers of a new product, conduct a needs analysis, develop a training program and evaluation procedures, and deliver the product training online with sales representatives. A state department curriculum specialist might develop and clone samples of new content standards and sample assessments to local school district counterparts for co-development and post their improvements on a moderated WikiTask™ for broader input and insights from other state or international curriculum specialists. Virtual classroom teachers might clone lessons to parents to support their children in the home, seek their ideas for home-based activities, and post the lessons as WikiTasks™ for parents throughout a local school district. A parent/guardian might develop a lesson for teaching his or her children how to save and invest their allowances and send messages to colleagues to encourage their children to try the lesson and share results. All members in each scenario above can use instant messaging, send and receive colleague and team messages, invite friends and associates to join a team, form a network of colleagues, and locate colleagues with similar backgrounds and passions for teaching and learning. These examples demonstrate how LearningFront breaks down content, communication, time, and location barriers as colleagues collaborate, co-create, and share to expand the frontier of learning. LearningFront isn't a static web site offering just information and web links -- it's a dynamic web-based application for advancing the frontier of learning through online learning communities! What happens when you join LearningFront?