Facebook announced Thursday that it’s teaming up with Summit Public Schools, which are consistently ranked among the top in the nation, to improve the classroom experience.
Facebook created software called PLP (personalized learning platform/plan) that includes an overview of the year’s curriculum, a project view to help students organize their work using a calendar, course materials, and tests. Teachers will be able to review students’ work and collaborate with one another to create lesson plans.
This software provides an efficient way for students to learn at their own pace. The teachers’ role will involved more guidence rather than providing step-by-step instructions.
Summit focused on personalized learning prior to its partnership with Facebook, but the system in place had a few roadblocks. There was a single engineer in charge of tracking students’ progress, and the personalized dashboards were connected to various third-party systems. This caused it to work slowly and sometimes even break down. It was made even less efficient because students had to log into each third-party system separately.
Facebook rolled out a pilot program this year; it hopes to expand its availability to more public schools in the near future.
The is just another example of a tech company giant entering the education sphere. Google released its Classroom software last year, and recently upgraded it just in time for the 2015-2016 school year.