Where The Education Community Connects

The purpose is simple, yet unmistakably ambitious as it drives the development of edweb.net.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with founder and CEO, Lisa Schmucki about edweb, its past roots and its future growth.

For Schmucki, who holds a wealth of experience in the education publishing industry, the edweb began somewhat suddenly.

“I was just driving around one day and all of a sudden I just started thinking, there should be a facebook for teachers. Teachers have such a need to connect with one another and collaborate.”

It is a need edweb seems to satisfy sufficiently, as it nurtures online communities for education professionals. And though there are already several online communities for educators (Classroom 2.0 is one notable example), Schmucki sees the edweb as a community with a purpose and identity distinct from other education-focused social networking endeavors.

“I think what we are offering is something a little bit different, and that probably comes from my education publishing background. Most of those sites are peer-to-peer with teachers talking to teachers. And the education community buys an enormous number of educational products and services. What I heard on both sides is both companies selling to schools talk about being partners with educators and then the educators themselves were talking about vendors being their partners. We have created a platform where the publishers and the teachers and the associations can all interconnect and can be equal members.”

Such a platform provides an unparalleled resource for publishers and other vendors looking to partner with teachers, who presumably share equal interest. It is important to note that while teachers join absolutely free of charge, education vendors must pay a fee to create communities in edweb.

After all, edweb is perhaps the most legitimate online community which is bringing together teachers and vendors. As Lisa said, many social networking sites for teachers are reluctant to cater to education vendors. They remain teacher-centric and surely, that disposition holds some advantages.

But in a lot of ways, edweb is far more reflective of what is truly a dynamic and diverse education community. I personally experimented with membership and peeked into a few communities. The interactions seem vibrant and substantial—helped in part by an accessible, easy to use design and platform.

Edweb utilizes basic social networking tools that have been pioneered by web giants like Facebook, providing messaging capabilities, wall-writing, video and image sharing and its hallmark communities. Schmucki also revealed that plans for a bulletin board on each member’s profile are currently in the works, which would showcase what each member (who chooses to use it) is working on.

When I asked Lisa where she would like to see edweb in five years, she insisted that edweb would remain close to its founding principle: to create a community for the education community. She and the edweb team remain dedicated to improving tools and features on the site as they pursue a basic objective: “to build it out as far as it can go within the professional education community.”