Scholastic, the global children's publishing, education, and media company, came to Method to create a social website for K-8 teachers. The site, Lesson Exchange, includes a suite of integrated tools and functionality that allows teachers to find, discuss, create, share and save book-centered teaching materials, lesson plans, and multimedia assets.
Though pressed for time, K-8 teachers today are always looking for breadth and variety of relevant teaching resources, preferably free or at very low cost. Many repository silos have appeared, yet most are not interoperable, inclusive, widely used, or easy to use. Scholastic's research indicated that teachers are very attracted to the idea of open educational resources, but the current online landscape still expects teachers to find needles in haystacks.
Scholastic's Teacher Open Educational Resources Project teamed up with Method to address this urgent and evolving need through the judicious use of proven social networking tools, user-centered design, contemporary iterative development methods, and external promotion techniques. The result is a suite of tools and functionality that will meaningfully improve the creation, re-mixing, browsing, and usage of quality lessons and resources.