For people who want to see what can happen when students and teachers collaborate on a project, check out the redesign of beaconschool.org. It’s amazing — I’ve always taken a lot of pride in Beacon’s web site, but the new design updates the look and feel of the site to as hip and cool as anything that’s out there. And they’ve added more in depth department pages, updated the navigation so you can get to information more quickly.

In other words… sleek, easy to use, chock full of information.

And it was a true collaboration between Tech Coordinator / Teacher Kate Reed, Systems Administrator Daniel Markovic and Student Designer Ed Almonte. The three of them have been working on this since the summer, and trust me, they had to go back and try to figure out how Loren and I did stuff when we last updated the site. (And trust me, there were some seriously disorganized directories there.) And from what I observed this summer, and from what I know of the three of them, they all played important roles, and they worked as a team on it.

And the proof is the product. This is what schools can do. This is the ultimate representation of project-based learning. Congratulations to Dan, Kate and Ed. You all lead the way for the rest of us to follow.

Once again, beaconschool.org. Go see what they’ve done.