Dalton Explorer is one of three web-based tools that make up an online knowledge sharing system (the others are Music Navigator and the Primary Sources archive). The combined toolset allows for Student-to-Student, Student-to-Teacher, and Teacher-to-Teacher collaboration as well as the seamless sharing of both work and multi-media resources.
Dalton Explorer handles the sharing of bodies of work between students and teachers as well as between teachers and other teachers. From a student’s perspective, Explorer allows the creation and maintenance of digital “portfolios” of academic work. In combination with curriculum management tools (discussed below), the portfolio allows students to track their work not only for the duration of a course but throughout their career at Dalton. It provides threading by course, discipline, goals, skills, and educational “themes”. This allows a student (and her teachers) to look at her a body of work as a whole, preventing earlier work from being lost, and facilitating analysis of and reflection upon this whole. Accessible from any Internet connection via our secure server, Dalton Explorer is invaluable to the student and the student’s family as an archival tool.
In addition to assisting in the management of students evolving body of work, Dalton Explorer allows teachers to manage and share their evolving body of curriculum work. The system augments simple course and lesson planning by allowing entries to be associated, or “linked”, via customizable themes, skills developed, educational goals, and disciplines. Once it has entered the system, a teacher’s collection of lessons and courses becomes a dynamic and evolving knowledge base that can connect to, draw from, and contribute to the knowledge bases assembled in the system by fellow faculty. The teacher is also provided with access-appropriate sections of student’s portfolios to facilitate assessment and help the teacher provide better guidance.
The system provides the additional benefit of making course/lesson information available even in the original author’s absence. In that case, a fellow faculty member can cover a lesson without disrupting the course by consulting the lesson plan of that day as well as those already completed and those coming up. When used to its fullest, the system can provide a covering teacher with access to insight regarding the specific classroom environment that would otherwise be unavailable.