Teach42

You all know that I try not to get too corporate here on Teach42, but occasionally something rolls around that I’m just genuinely excited about and have to share.

When I first got hired on to Discovery, one of my very first meetings was to help brainstorm ideas for a new product. The rough idea was to create a site that gave schools an easy way to organize their media, subscription services, news, and documents. Beyond that first day, I was never really involved in the project much, but a few weeks ago I got to see a working demo for it in all its glory, and I gotta tell you I think it’s freakin’ cool.

The best part? I finally got permission to share some info and screenshots before it has actually been officially released to the public. I feel like such an insider now. SO, here’s the scoop!

It’s going to be called Discovery Education: OnePlace. It may be a little hard to explain, but around here we’re calling it a “Digital Media Management” tool. Probably the best way to ‘get it’ is to just dive right into the features.

The strongest feature it has, IMHO, is that it provides a Single Sign On (SSO) and Universal Search across all of your online subscription services. You know all those services that your district pays for every year that most teachers don’t even know about? MediaNet, Atomic Learning, World Book online, heck even unitedstreaming… They don’t do much good if teachers don’t know that you have a subscription there, or if they don’t know what their username and password is. Log in once to OnePlace and not only are all your subscription sites listed right in front of you, but you can click on any of them to go straight to that site already logged in. No worries about remembering URL’s or passwords.

Of course, you wouldn’t want to waste your time actually VISITNG each of those sites to see if they have the content you’re looking for, would you? Of course not. That’s why there’s a universal search engine in there. One search, across all of your subscription services, with the results organized by site. If you like one site better than another, you can just click and drag that site to the top of the list and then it’ll show those results first. I think I remember hearing that partrs of the site were created in AJAX, so it flows really well. Feels smooth, like working in Google Calendar.

Got digital stories and podcasts you want to share internally? You can upload and manage all your content locally. It has a pretty robust upload engine, and the files all go into that same universal search. It also has a repository for storing and organizing all of your professional development documents and school forms. Really easy to use, and once again, a single convenient place for people to get access to everything they need.

There’s a ton of other features, I’m not going to list them all, but there is one other that I don’t want to forget to mention. If you looked closely at that first screenshot, you probably saw modules along the side of the screen. Those are widgets and can be populated with all sorts of stuff like weather, polls, discussion board posts, etc… However, my favorite thing to put int here has to be RSS feeds. That way you can take advantage of the ease of blogs to handle things like announcements and school news, and then just have them aggregated on the site. Use any blog engine you want, so long as the RSS feed is valid, it’ll work.

As a former Director of IT, I would have loved to get this in a heartbeat. The main benefit in my mind is that it ensures that we’d be getting maximum value out of all of our OTHER subscription services. Having access to Atomic Learning is great, but it’s a total waste of money if people don’t know they have it or don’t know their password. There’s a ton of other things to like in there, but that’s the biggest one to me.

Of course, since it hasn’t been completed yet, some features might change or not even make it into the final product. And the look and feel may still be re-arranged before release as well. So take everything with a grain of salt and if things do change before they go live, don’t come crying to me. But if you like what you see and want to find out some more information about it, you can drop a line to a buddy of mine in the company who knows all the nitty gritty details.

SO… Whatcha think? Personally, I think it’s pretty freakin’ cool. Look promising to you?

technorati tags:discovery, oneplace, media, education, school

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