"Most teachers are still writing their lesson plans in Word or its equivalent, which is like writing your code in notepad without any coding-specific extensions."

There are plug-ins for Word that can produce quizzes, and most of the interactive white-board software packages (each dedicated to a make of interactive white-board) can import from Powerpoint or allow authoring of interactive content. What I as a teacher don't need is someone telling me to use some huge IDE like package to build my lessons!

In the future I'd like to use a cheap tablet to scribe on and have what I'm scribing (or what I have prepared earlier) just appear on the projector and on the student tablets. I'd also like to be able to invite student A to 'show' something to everyone else. Then I'd like to be able to roll the whole lesson up and pop it somewhere like a Moodle course so the students can access the stuff later for revision.

The original article addresses 'back end' student tracking and data capture type software. More of a business application.

I was talking about a different project that I would like to see happen, but built using a similar development model. To be more specific, I'd like to see a dedicated curriculum development tool built. I;d like it to be high-quality and open source, so it can see widespread use in schools of every economic level.

I am not envisioning a simple plugin to a word processing tool; I am imagining a dedicated curriculum development tool that manages things like importing standards, and connecting detailed parts of a learning plan to bigger-picture summaries.

I in no way imagine such a tool being mandated for anyone; I simply imagine a tool that is powerful enough that people will see it used well by experienced teachers, and want to use it themselves.

"I simply imagine a tool that is powerful enough that people will see it used well by experienced teachers, and want to use it themselves."

Well, good luck, and if you have thought through the detail of this I would be interested to see the specification (in the Spolsky sense) for the system you envisage.

"I in no way imagine such a tool being mandated for anyone"

Of course everyone will have to use it!

Edit: parent poster is also a teacher, so he must know that anything that is suggested by management as a central tool will immediately become mandatory!

I am hoping to complete my MEd in December, and I want to complete an mvp of an os ed tool as my masters project. I wrote a bit about the tool I envision previously [1], and I recognize that the next step is writing a proper spec. That will be part of the masters work.

Nice to see another teacher on here!

[1] http://peak5390.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/why-do-programmers-...

Good luck with the more detailed specification. I shall read it with interest. In the UK we tend to have many small outcomes per lesson, and a second document called a scheme of work tracks the large arc of a year's work.

Thanks for this japhyr. Our project is proceeding on track and on budget and we are going to be piloting in elementary schools by April of this year. Our primary focus now is reporting and business intelligence which will not only produce embedded reports but allow for Ad Hoc and true BI capability so schools and teachers can get real analysis capabilities in a user-friendly dashboard.

gregg

Hey man, I feel like your interests and mine intersect? Do you have any personal Twitter/microblogging streams I can subscribe to? :)

I have some contact information in my profile, and I'd be happy to hear from you or anyone else.