about

Teach. Collaborate. Learn.

SITE is an experiment in democratic open-source education. It is meant for public use. Our objective is to build a vast, co-produced network of students and educators worldwide. SITE hopes to cultivate, collect, and distribute thoughtful lesson plans, free resources, and powerful dialogue for its users. We view SITE as a social service for educators by educators.

We view this platform as an alternative supplement to the traditional school system. SITE is a sustainable system that thrives on notions of social justice, critical social media, student / teacher empowerment, and active social change.

We view students and teachers as producers and collaborators. A dynamic learning environment encourages people to actively participate in the construction of their own knowledge. We hope all SITE contributors see themselves as life-long learners.

Mission:
Our Mission is to help improve the ways we teach, learn and think about education through:
1. An expanding virtual community based on respectful dialogue, discussion and debate
2. Beautifully designed, free-to-use resources for educators worldwide based on community input from SITE’s forum.

Vision:
Our Vision is to improve the school system through our accessible online discussion forum.
We agree that it takes a village to raise a child. Therefore, we hope SITE’s ‘virtual village’ can exchange ideas, inspirations and ingenious practices that reflect the practical as well as the theoretical. We firmly believe that if you are reading this you have something to contribute.

Our Vision is to make teaching and learning resources, based on the SITE community’s needs, that will incorporate *Art, *Activism and *Technology as guiding points for learning.
If everyone exchanged their best ideas in one meeting place, SITE’s production team could harness this sound, spectacular and special content to create free, edited and designed lessons that are ready to use in the classroom. Content will be implemented, reviewed, and revised by the community, allowing lessons to grow organically. This includes curriculum, professional development, best teaching tactics, inspiring stories, ideas about policy, student growth, modern teaching tools and anything else relevant to those who have a stake in education.

SITE defines:
*Art as the act of creating something new and meaningful with a focus on aesthetics
*Activism as a cultural or political action meant to improve society or self.
*Technology as using available tools to facilitate production.

Reasons:

• Both teaching and learning can be isolating experiences, therefore, we want to connect the disparate parts of the system into a productive, functioning whole.
• We think that community members can mentor and advise each other.
• We want to create curriculum that is built from the inside out rather than outside in.
• We think people need a safe environment to voice opinions.
• We would like to compile great ideas in one place.
• We think it’s hard for teachers to make their way across town after a long day of teaching to have a meeting-therefore we think creating a virtual ‘meeting space’ is more convenient.
• We like beautifully designed books, graphics, infographics, comic books, graphic novels, photographs, etc. and we’d like to integrate them into lessons.
• We think teachers should be facilitators of information-we’d like to facilitate their facilitating by targeting folks who are the best and the brightest in their fields.
• We believe everyone has something to teach.
• We believe that teaching and learning should be fun-we want SITE to be fun.
• We believe in Paolo Freire’s social/pedagogical/constructive approach which started with a dialogue in the community. We would like to do the same but in a virtual community.

Who We Are:
SITE is a grassroots, public initiative. We have a core group of collaborators who help facilitate and sustain the day-to-day operations of this project.

SITE is supported by DePaul University’s College of Education and includes the initiatives Stockyard Institute and the Center for Educational Technology. We are all involved in the educational system in some capacity. We are a group of educators, organizers, technology instructors, designers, artists, counselors, web developers, activists, cultural producers, writers and curriculum specialists.