Team name: Team 8
Team members: Jan Sykora, Jan Krsnak, Olga Attard, Radka Tesikova, Kamila Hazdrova
Challenge: Sharing good practice and inspiration for better education
Challenge host: Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, Prague, Czech Republic
Challenge theme: The Learning Experience

Solution description: 
While existing social media platforms can be of use to education, these platforms are generic, and lack a focus towards learning and teaching. The idea behind “Educators Lounge” is to take the best of the tried and tested applications and implement a solution targeted for Czech educational professionals.
One could argue that educators can easily use existing social media platforms to interact and share ideas, however, it is easy to get distracted when using such diverse, non-focused tools. The need for such collaborative tools has been long felt, so much so that there have been attempts in the past to bridge this gap, albeit with limited success.

Educators’ Lounge will therefore be a one-stop social platform aimed at educators to facilitate the sharing of learning materials whilst encouraging socialising with their peers. In a nutshell, it is a fusion between Facebook and Pinterest for educators. The aim is to promote a safe environment where educators share their work (such as lesson plans and videos) as open source, thus contributing and benefiting from each other’s work. The platform has three main aspects: 1) the collection of personal or shared boards with a compilation of interesting materials the user creates or finds and saves; 2) the option to use templates for creating new education material; and 3) a discussion forum where educators can discuss different topics, brainstorm and share their ideas.

User engagement, participation and feedback will be a fundamental measure of success of this solution. This platform is a paradigm for “content is king” and the more quality content uploaded and shared, the more user engagement is generated. The platform is built in a way that quality content is recognised (by ratings, mentions, and shares) thus encouraging users to upload and share their creations, knowing that apart from helping other professionals, they themselves can benefit from suggestions to improve the same content. Our motto is: “Sharing is caring, but it’s also rewarding!”

Read the full description of the solution here