Many schools and institutions are developing their own online learning communities. These communities are part of the Web 2.0 trend of collaborative, social, and interactive websites. These sites have many features that benefit educators, students, and parents. The following are some of features of an online learning community. 

1. School calendars and upcoming events are available and easily updated by administrators.

2. Classroom teachers post homework, project information, and field trip details.

3. Parents and students access homework, project information, and school notes.

4. Teachers securely make marks available online for individual students and their parents.

5. Clubs and teams post information, schedules, and results.

6. Assignments are submitted and assessed electronically.

7. Students and teachers can communicate via secured messaging and email services.

8. Students, parents, and teachers communicate with each other on classroom bulletin boards.

9. Students participate in blogging and online discussion forums.

When we created our school’s online learning community, I thought I might be the only one that would use it. However, as other teachers learned about the tools the website contained, they quickly became enthused and started incorporating the site into their own teaching. 

Our school developed our site www.burkevale.com using Moodle (www.moodle.org), one of the more popular  and easy to use open source course management systems on the market.