Welcome

The Anywhere Classroom Initiative is a not for profit project to create free educational tools for educators.

Background

I spent several years as a webmaster and educator working with online education concepts. I’ve setup Moodle, I’ve examined tons of educational software designed for creating online classes and distance learning. What I felt was missing was something that was both simpler for an educator to set up to create a class, and something that was also more visually appealing for the student.

On top of that, the future is clearly one in which online education must be accessible from anywhere- and that means creating a framework that easily exports class content to tablets, smartphones, desktops, and anything else that comes along that can display a class. With constantly changing software and hardware, and battles over standards with the not quite there HTML 5 and the now abandoned on tablets and smartphones Flash, figuring out how to do it becomes a rather difficult prospect.

This will take some time to develop, and we hope to enlist the aid of talented programmers and designers, along with lots of input from educators about what they need. What I hope to do here is to layout some guidelines to create a consistency across different platforms. By setting standards, we can assure that all elements continue to work together smoothly. This a moving target and the development tools used will have to evolve as the technology does. I look forward to input and suggestions.

In time, we should be able to develop a robust set of free and easy to use tools to help teachers do what they do best – teach, but with the added benefit of being able to reach anyone anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.