Blue Wrench -- Mission

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Mission

Open Source

Software products that are open source are available to the public in a format (source code) where it can be adapted, improved, and shared by practitioners. Perhaps the most famous of open source products is Linux, a version of the UNIX operating system developed and place on open source by Linus Torvalds, a young programmer in Helsinki, Finland.

In an important way, education is increasingly becoming an open source endeavor. Teachers have always shared ideas and instructional materials with each other, the expectation being that each educator would adapt the products and ideas for their students, instructional objectives, and particular teaching styles. This practice has been accelerated by the e-mail and the World Wide Web as educators around the world have made their web resources, handouts, and even their lesson plans available to an emerging community of teachers, eager to share and grow their knowledge and resources.

It is with this spirit of sharing and growing that BLUE WRENCH is being made available for teachers and students to use, adapt, and share.

...education is increasingly becoming an open source endeavor.

Mission 1: Representative, Dynamic, and Valuable School & Classroom Web Sites

Increasingly, people are beginning to prefer the Internet as a source of information that they use for work and personal life. We shop, plan vacations, read book and movie reviews, check the weather, and read the news from the convenience of our computers. People are expecting high quality and interactive information when using the Internet, and they will be expecting no less from the school and classroom web pages of their children.

In order to provide this kind of dynamic and valuable information, the online communication must be a conversation, between the educator and the student/parents/community. It must be constant, interactive, and absolutely up-to-date. Traditionally, school and classroom pages have been built and maintained with web editing software, such as: FrontPage, or Dreamweaver. However, more times than not these pages are created, installed on the Net, and then forgotten.

A number of services became available over the past four years that provided teachers with a template-based tool, with which they could add and update information using a web form. As a result, web pages could be dynamic and up-to-date. Unfortunately, most of these service have disappeared with many other dotcoms and those who have survived either charge a fee for included ads on the teacher pages. One exception is TeacherWeb (http://www.teacherweb.com), which provides a simple, yet powerful tool without advertisements.

Still, even with TeacherWeb, all pages created with this tool look alike. There is no sense that you are part of a particular school, district, or state. One mission of BLUE WRENCH is to provide the same template-based tool for teachers within a page layout designed by a local web designer, a page look that is distinct and represents a particular classroom, school, or district.

...provide the same template-based tool for teachers within a ... page look that is distinct and represents a particular classroom, school, or district.

Mission 2: Enterprise Endeavors by Students & Teachers

BLUE WRENCH is open source, because the best solutions for communicating between the school and the community will come from the school. Talented teachers and students will take this tool and tweak it, adapting the features and design to solve their problems. I many (or most) cases, it will be students who are skilled in this level of programming, and their skill and technical knowledge should be leveraged by the school to improve school/community communication.

The vision here is a team of teachers and students, who's job it is to establish and maintain a school web site, offering interactive pages for each teacher. Member of the team will provide technical services, and also consultation with teachers and other staff as they try to improve the quality of their school/home connection.

The experience for students will be an authentic one. They will learn teamwork, communication, and problem solving -- not to mention the technical skills they will gain. The school, in return, will have a dynamic, growing web presence.

The experience for students will be an authentic one. They (students) will learn teamwork, communication, and problem solving -- not to mention the technical skills they will gain.