Personalized Learning Plan, backed by the social media giant, will be made free for public schools.
By Raghavendra M
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Facebook, the largest social-networking site, was impressed by the remarkable results a group of schools run by a non-profit organization – they are consistently ranked among the best schools in California, almost all of their graduates are accepted to at least one four-year college or university.
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When the Facebook approached the Summit Public Schools, they were surprised to know about an innovative approach they took towards learning – they were using a software tool named to educate and monitor students’ progress.
The approach was:
- The classroom isn’t for lectures but is reserved for teacher-led real-world projects and collaboration, and content and assessments are delivered online.
- The learning experience is completely personalized to each student, who works with his teacher to set his own long-term goal (e.g. “become a doctor”, “sportsperson”, “learn to code”) and then lay out a plan to achieve them over the course of many years.
- And there is a software tool, which helps each student to keep track of his or her coursework as a path towards the goal.
The software tool, Personalized Learning Plan (PLP), helped teachers to closely monitor students and how they were progressing and to give tailored feedback each day. Even parents had access to monitor their kids’ progress at any time.
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When a team of engineers from Facebook approached the Summit, they were told that the technology being used was not good enough. Then the team collaborated with the Summit and started working on rebuilding PLP.
Later, the software tool was used in the 2014 school year, giving access to more than 2,000 students and 100 teachers.
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This year, Facebook is supporting Summit, which is partnering with public schools that want to explore the personalized learning tool through a pilot program. The feedback they receive will help improve the PLP, which would be made available for free for schools in the US.
Facebook has said the PLP is completely separate from the social network and doesn’t require a Facebook account. The whole project subscribes to the White House-endorsed Student Privacy Pledge and even its team of engineers handle the data in accordance with the pledge, Facebook said in a blog post.