About LearningFRONT

What is LearningFRONT?

LearningFRONT is a dynamic learning community. Members access LearningFRONT entirely over the Internet -- there's no infrastructure to buy, set-up, or manage -- just log in, learn, and improve.

What is LearningFRONT's vision and mission?

LearningFRONT is committed to achieving the vision of:

"Advancing the frontier of learning through dynamic learning communities!"

The LearningFRONT frontier is the leading edge of current ways of teaching, training, and learning. It's where LearningFRONT creates 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 digital 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 LearningFRONT. 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, training, and learning.

Why use LearningFRONT?

LearningFRONT is unique because it combines social and professional learning tools for teaching, training, and learning any content, with any adult, 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, WikiTasks™, TaskBuilder™, and Programs:

  • An elementary charter school teacher forms a team with other teachers throughout a charter school network to co-create and share effective teaching strategies for grade three mathematics and completes online professional learning programs to improve mathematics assessments.

  • A middle school sixth grade team collaborates with a feeder elementary school fifth grade team on planning data-driven lessons and, then, post their results in WikiTasks™ to serve as prototypes for other LearningFRONT members in their district and worldwide.

  • A high school department chairperson identifies priority content standards for an international education unit, clones them to teachers requesting lessons be co-created to achieve the standards, and, then, posts as WikiTasks, lessons with the most promise for worldwide application.

  • A home school teacher forms a team with other home school teachers throughout the nation to co-create and share effective teaching strategies for science lessons and shares results in a data display.

  • A principal creates a team of other principals to exchange messages about the tasks needed to implement an instructional improvement strategy to increase student achievement. Then, they clone best practices and effective lessons from their teachers to each other to act as prototypes for instructional improvement.

  • Student teachers 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 clone their coaching tips back to the student teachers.

  • A corporate trainer collaborates with a team of product developers, conducts a needs analysis, develops a training program and evaluation procedures, and delivers new product training online with sales representatives.

  • A government funded contract trainer organizes a train-the-trainer professional learning program for helping a national organization to scale training in drug abuse to communities across the nation.

  • A state department curriculum specialist develops and clones samples of new content standards and sample assessments to local school district counterparts for co-development and posts their improvements on a moderated WikiTask™ for broader input and insights from other state or international curriculum specialists.

  • Virtual classroom teachers 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 develops a lesson for teaching his or her children how to save and invest their allowances and sends messages to colleagues to encourage their children to try the lesson and share results.

All members in each scenario above 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, training, and learning. These examples demonstrate how LearningFRONT breaks down content, communication, time, and location barriers as colleagues collaborate, co-create, and share to advance the frontier of learning.

What happens when you join LearningFRONT?

People. When you join LearningFRONT, your homepage opens the way to an online community of people, tools, and actions for advancing the frontier of learning. On the people menu, members use their profile, colleagues, and team features to communicate and collaborate.

  • Profile. The Profile feature summarizes your location, experiences, and passions for teaching, training, and learning and displays badges for your accomplishments. Your profile helps you to find and be found by other members.

  • Colleagues. The Colleagues feature helps you to find and invite other members to become your colleagues. This leads to opportunities to expand your colleagues network with "colleagues of your colleagues." And you can invite other people you know to join LearningFRONT and network with you.

  • Teams The teams feature helps a member to organize and leverage the knowledge, skills, and experiences of two or more members and colleagues on a common goal related to teaching, training, and learning. Teams are aimed primarily at putting together LearningFRONT members who share the same interests or development goals. Teams co-create, share, and seek feedback about learning resources and stimulate relevant discussion all in one spot.

Your LearningFRONT community consists of your colleagues and their colleagues and your teams, networking you to potentially thousands of individuals dedicated to new and better ways of learning.

Tool Box. In the LearningFRONT tool box menu, members use the following tools to create and share new and better ways of learning:

  • TaskBuilder™ is a tool for improving teaching, training, and learning. It helps members to learn and practice what successful teachers and trainers do to help all learners reach high expectations. By using it now, members can build a repertoire of skills and resources for helping all learners -- children, youth, and adults -- to learn basic skills, rigorous academic standards, job expectations, and technical skills. TaskBuilder™ implements research on effective teaching and training and aligns with local, state, national, and industry standards of learning. With TaskBuilder, members can complete the following “Tasks” of teaching and training:
    1. Plan standards-based units, lessons, and training plans
    2. Construct formative and summative assessments
    3. Align standards, instruction or training, and assessment
    4. Teach a skill, concept, process, or principle
    5. Integrate graphic organizers
    6. Differentiate instruction, training, and assessment
    7. Evaluate learner performances with scoring tools such as rubrics
    8. Analyze learner performance data and act on results
    9. Clone and WikiTask™ lessons and other teaching tasks to colleagues
    10. Communicate with colleagues and other members
  • Programs is a tool for delivering professional learning programs to improve teaching, training, and learning. Programs offers professional learning anytime, anywhere to individuals using a computer connected to the Internet.  For example, it has been used to deliver training and coaching to beginning and experienced teachers on the job, to prepare graduate teacher education students, to help individuals prepare for the Professional Teaching Knowledge exam administered by the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence, to deliver workplace wellness programs and technical assistance to small to midsize employers, and to assist individual users to improve their knowledge and skills related to quality teaching, and to acquire continuing education or inservice credits to renew teaching certificates.

  • WikiTasks™ helps members to post and access teaching, training, and learning tasks developed with TaskBuilder. WikiTasks allows members to access, clone, and edit available content independently or collaboratively. The "Wiki It" option makes your task available to all LearningFRONT members without any restrictions for making changes to your WikiTask content and format. This option works best for getting feedback from the broadest audience in the WikiTask space of LearningFRONT. The "Moderate It" option makes your task available to all LearningFRONT members with restrictions for making changes to your WikiTask content and format. This option requires your approval to changes anyone suggests before the revised task appears in the WikiTask space of LearningFRONT. This option works best for ensuring control over changes made to your WikiTask.

  • Bookmarks is a tool for LearningFRONT members to quickly access a specific location in a professional learning program. Members personally label bookmarks to create a customized table of contents for their 15 latest locations.

  • Coaching is a tool for LearningFRONT members to schedule coaching sessions with a coach or instructor to support teaching, training, and learning tasks in LearningFRONT.

  • Messages help members, colleagues, and teams to carry out their roles and keep in touch on LearningFRONT. For example, "Member News" offers important information about LearningFRONT features and benefits. "My Messages" sends and receives communications among members and colleagues and  “Team Messages” does the same for Team members.

  • Instant Messaging is a text-based conversation over the Internet between two colleagues who must be logged into LearningFRONT at the same time. Unlike email, instant messaging allows colleagues to "talk" to each other in real time by entering and receiving text messages.

Learning Community Actions. LearningFRONT also offers Doing, Networking, Inviting, and Locating actions to inform your colleagues about your status and to build your dynamic learning community.

  • Doing allows you to share what you are doing as you use LearningFRONT. This tool uses a pop-up menu of status actions that lets your colleagues know if you are planning, teaching, browsing and so forth. The status action you select shows up on your homepage and in your colleagues' My Colleagues list.

  • Networking identifies colleagues of your new colleagues. Using this tool, you can view potential colleagues' profiles and invite them to be your colleagues. If accepted, a new colleague will be added to your My Colleagues list. This tool helps you to expand your learning community as far as you wish.

  • Inviting provides a way for you to invite people you know to join LearningFRONT. By using valid email addresses and extending invitations, you will connect the people you know and trust with the LearningFRONT sign-up web page. 

  • Locating helps members to find a colleague in LearningFRONT. When you and other members complete the "Locate Me" feature in your profile, you provide searchable information about your location, experiences, and passions related to teaching and learning. Other members use this information when they attempt to locate a new colleague.

Who owns LearningFRONT™?

LearningFRONT™ is privately owned and operated by LearningFRONT™ and was launched on 1 January 2009.

Contact LearningFRONT™