Making Firefox the Killer-App for K-12 Education

There are some projects over at Mozilla Labs that just might make it possible to turn Firefox into the “killer-app” for K-12 education, both in North America, and around the world.

• JetPack is a set of tools for extending the browser using open, standards-based technologies like CSS, HTML, and Javascript.
• Prism is another labs project that lets you wrap a website into a bundle that looks, feels and works more like an application than a web resource.
• Weave, also from Mozilla Labs, will synchronize browser content across multiple machines, so you can start a project on a machine at school, and continue it on a mobile device or your computer at home.

So here’s how we could use these technologies to make Firefox the next K-12 “killer-app”:

The ultimate ne plus ultra K12 killer app has lots of different features, and lives in a moderately complex environment. But I believe it can be implemented incrementally as a series of small open source projects using Jetpack and Prism. Schools and even individual teachers could then select which extensions fit their needs. With luck, they will even be able to choose between competing extensions created by developers with different viewpoints about how to approach these problems.

Schools today make heavy use of curriculum materials that are “aligned” to state curriculum standards. Teachers want to use materials, including web resources, that directly address the curriculum standards they need to cover in class. As I lament in a previous post, the current state of these standards is a problem, with only three states offering their curriculum standards in XML, and the lack of a set of national standards. Many districts also modify the state standards by extending or sub-setting them.

There are proprietary search engines such as netTrekker that correlate some of the web to curriculum standards. But these are, for the most part, closed, proprietary solutions. We need to encourage the creation of open, shared curriculum alignment data. Certainly Wikipedia is an existence proof for large collective efforts of this kind. But the creation mechanism is slightly different.

Imagine a Jetpack Firefox extension that lets teachers collect, and correlate web resources to the curriculum standards in use in their districts, as well as rating them for quality with only a few additional clicks in the course of their normal lesson planning. Teachers could optionally submit those correlations to a central database to share with the education community. As the dataset matures it also becomes a driver for teacher lesson preparation, think of somthing akin to StumbleUpon that knows the curriculum requirements.

This data set can be integrated into student mentoring Jetpacks as well. When a student has difficulty with a particular concept in a homework assignment, a student Jetpack could recommend alternate presentations of material correlated to the same standard.

Another useful tool would be a Jetpack that takes a list of urls aligned with curriculum standards and tracks time-on-task for each standard. This should provide persistence across browser sessions, and the ability to track results for individual students in shared computer environments.

There should also be support for curriculum alignment meta tags that would allow web content creators to provide both direct correlations to various curriculum standards and “hints” to appropriate alignment of the content as well as the range of grade level for which the material is intended. Organizations like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, NASA, and many corporations currently offer on-line lesson plans to teachers, but there is no standardized way for them to supply curriculum alignment information in a machine readable manner.

Because the system will, of necessity, transparently support more than one correlation standard, it will also allow the use of “synthetic” correlation standards derived from the combination of all of the various individual state and district standards. This will provide a platform for discussion of possible national and international curriculum standards in a far more rational manner than is possible today.

First steps toward this ambitious project would provide real benefits for teachers and students even before the creation of a large database of correlated web content. Consider the following (more modest) possiblites:

• A Lesson-Plan Assembly Jetpack that lets teachers fill-in lesson plan templates in a point and click fashion while browsing for educational resources.
• A “compound URL” packaging Jetpack that enables teachers to bundle an assignment with supporting bookmarks, and documents (PDFs, image files, text files, etc.) into a single file that can be either emailed or posted on a web page for download.
• A companion Jetpack for students that can open these bundles and present them to the students in an encapsulated assignment workspace (color-coded tabs for the the assignment text, links, documents, and perhaps text editing tab). Include a way for students to add student-generated content to the bundle, save and reload the workspace after doing work, and turn-in work by sending the bundle (or just the student additions) back to the teacher (http upload or email).
• A Jetpack that lets a student do research on an arbitrary (Jetpack equipped) computer, and save results (and browser state) to a thumb drive (or synced to Weave) so that when work resumes on another machine the student can pick up where he or she left off.

What I’ve presented here is really just the beginning of what could be done to turn Firefox into the ultimate “killer-app” for K-12 education. Not everything presented here can be implemented quickly, but all this and more is possible with using the projects currently being worked on in Mozilla Labs. The sooner we start the sooner we can make a difference in educational outcomes. Use the comment form below to contribute your ideas to the discussion.