Dive Brief:

• In an interview with eSchoolNews, Mira Brown, the external affairs officer for Summit Public Schools, discusses the California charter network’s collaboration with Facebook to build and maintain a personalized learning platform.
• The platform allows teachers and administrators to keep track of students’ individual short- and longterm goals, providing students with 24-7 access to material.
• Brown describes the network’s relationship with the group of volunteer engineers from Facebook as close and collaborative, with adjustments to the platform being made based on student needs and glitches ironed out when necessary.

Dive Insight:

Brown’s statements reveal the importance of a good partnership when schools are developing or seeking out technology that is central to operations and instruction. “Some of the engineers are literally as passionate about the platform as our teachers are and it’s not unusual to see Facebook engineers in our classrooms,” she said. When students asked to integrate project calendars into the platform, for example, engineers worked on it in time to include that option this school year.

For schools without Facebook in their backyard, Brown offers some useful guidance: “There has to be a comfort level among students, teachers, school leaders, and others that the tool is never ‘perfect.’ There’s always room for improvement, and in some cases it can feel sort of ‘messy’ as you’re building out new features and getting them into the system.”