Vision of MidwestEducation.org

Midwestern schools and their teachers have meaningful stories to tell and can be models worthy of emulation and study. Midwest Education is a place where those stories are told and their messages amplified.

History of the Effort

A few years ago, I created a website using Ning for Missouri Educators. I wanted a digital community space for teachers to find each other and share their ideas, questions, and pressing issues. The idea was to bring an ideal professional learning community environment out of the context of just one school and make it available to a broad, but meaningful network.

Previous Networks

The limitations of the Ning network became stricter as the free service disappeared and was replaced by a limited corporate sponsorship. The membership was capped and frozen at a restrictive level, and so I continued aggregating the stories, links, and tweets of Missouri Educators through a custom online newspaper and abandoned the Ning altogether.

Expanding Out from Missouri

The limitations of allowing only Missouri teachers and principals to join the website presented a problem to me. I liked that our content belonged to our state, but I felt–deep down–that we shared the same issues as our colleagues in neighboring areas. It would be better, I decided, to open it up to a more inclusive audience and authorship. Teachers from Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, Indiana, North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota as well as Missouri are all engaged in similar struggles to provide the best schooling possible from Pre-K to College.