The `Learning Element

School-level curriculum design and instructional delivery is often traditional, not incorporating highly interactive, multimodal social media technologies where users generate content to provide feedback for learners and to support formative assessment. This project team will develop key elements of today’s Web 2.0 social networking technologies to include the potential for collaborative content design amongst teams of teachers, easy dissemination of instructional content to students, and rapid, responsive formative and summative assessments of student work. The product, the Learning Element 3.0, will be the equivalent of Facebook for educators while focusing on professional rather than interpersonal interaction. The product will be framed to interconnect learning design, learning content delivery, learner activity, and learning assessment. The tool will consist of three closely interconnected online spaces, which users will choose to view separately or juxtapose in side-by-side panes presenting parallel views. These spaces will include: 1) a ‘teacher resource’ space in which lesson planning occurs; 2) a ‘learner resource’ space in which this plan is translated into student-accessible text for independent or semi-independent learning; and 3) a ‘learner workbook’ space in which students undertake activities in the ‘learner resource’ space that build on scaffolded reading activities completed in the ‘learner resource’ space.