Your home for learning

December 5th, 2007 at 11:20pm Anna Derocher

Several newsroom staffers are in Springfield today and tomorrow for NewsTrain. We spent most of today discussing strategies for adapting to the new world of online and multimedia, and ideas on how to cover news non-traditionally. This is the kind of stuff that gets me pumped. I already have several ideas about things we can do to bring Rock River Valley folks together on our Web site.

 One of the coolest ideas was an “online classroom.” The concept: Create a site that contains content from us and you. Want to know what’s going on in your kid’s classroom, check out what your kid’s teacher said on our site. Want to take a sample ACT, come to our site. Want to know what trends are in our local schools, come to our site. Want to share pictures, artwork, videos, come to our site. Want school board coverage, well, we’ll have that, too. We just may not “cover” that the way we’ve always covered it.

Not sure what all this means or how we get it all done, but I see us working in collaboration with you. We would be a gathering place for those who care about “community learning.” I see a citizen panel made up of 100 (or so) teachers, parents, kids, administrators and taxpayers discussing issues that are important to them live on our site, giving others an opportunity to weigh in. Our coverage of education would be better because we would be focusing on what you, the reader, wants. And, maybe, we would do our reporting online, giving you information as we know it so you can be part of the process.

It’s 11:16 p.m. right now, and I am dead tired. (I was up at 4 a.m. today.) Yet, I am so excited by the possibilities, I had to stay up to blog. Cause I wanted to share this concept. If this resonates with you, let me know. If you could have the perfect local education site/coverage, what you would you want? Let me know.

Entry Filed under: Online classroom, Community Web site, Education, Learning