This is an introduction to the Fashion Portal, a project that began at the CW Post Graduate School of Educational Technology Summer program in Southampton, NY, August, 2004. Graduate students who attended Camp 2004 may remember the Tuesday presentation by Faye Feller and Pat Gordon (HHH) and Bill Yotive (UN), regarding the Half Hollow Hills (HHH) Fashion Club and the UN Peace/Environment initiative, Magenta and the Magic Cloth. It was impressive to see two seemingly disjoint projects, a Fashion Illustration/Design class and the Pumped-Up-For-Peace Global Water project, combined in a single good-will initiative, Magenta and the Magic Cloth. Their slogan is "changing the world one style at a time." Soon after this presentation, Pat's Fashion Club at HHH had a web presence. A quickly designed Fashion Club "mock-up" web page was created so that the Fashion Portal could have an "official" web page immediately. It was no big deal to a CW Post Ed Tech graduate students. But it was a big deal to Pat and Faye. That's how the project began.

Much has happened in the weeks since that web page (newsletter) was created. From this simple gesture grew a larger and more interesting project that has taken on a life of its own and continues to get more exciting. The basic concept of the Fashion Portal is to connect Pat Gordon's Fashion Club (class) with a similar group of students in a Romanian high school, via audio/video web cams, and then use this classroom-to-classroom portal to build collaborative projects between the twinned classrooms (class-pals). This basic concept has since been set into motion and the "Fashion Portal" project has emerged. Many more details of the classroom-to-classroom portals can be found at http://eev2.liu.edu/westburyII/JG/admin/CTCP.HTM

The Fashion Portal project connecting American and Romanian students, is blossoming into an active project that now needs a collaborative team to shape it and to drive it. To successfully connect two schools in different parts of the world, and then help/facilitate/enable the teachers to use this "classroom-to-classroom portal" for maximum educational benefit (and other benefits) requires that we create a collaboration of people with combined skills or the interest to learn these skills. Nobody can be great at everything. That's why God created collaborative, project-based constructivist learning environments. (I always wanted to use those words in one sentence.) These projects (potentially) bring together more skills than are needed but never too many. Here are some of the skills this project development will need:

> Web design and publishing: Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks
> Audio/Video editing, Photo editing
> Audio/Video webcam teleconferencing, telephone conferencing
> Application sharing, white board collaboration, remote learning/control
> PowerPoint (MS Office)
> Online collaborative meetings - chats
> Curriculum/Project design & development (collaborative, interactive)
> Collaborative project management and coordination, accounting
> Information mining on the internet and elsewhere
> et al

The Fashion Portal collaborative project promises to be an opportunity to learn many of the things on this list and to improve skills in those applications one knows minimally. It also promises to be a lot of fun using some of the latest collaborative tools (toys) in developing this project. Using technology to connect classrooms in different parts of the world to form "class-pals" (like pen-pals) is a worthy project.

The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF) has some wonderful short films depicting successful CLE educational projects. Perhaps the Fashion Portal project can add other elements so we can create a GLEF-like video (project documentary). We can capture sounds and videos of the entire Fashion Portal project development process and produce the video later. This is just an idea for the Fashion Portal collaborators to consider.

When students begin TEAM, one of the early things discussed is selecting (inventing, joining, resurrecting) a collaborative project with fellow collaborators that will (hopefully) stay with students for their two years in TEAM. This collaborative project, whatever is eventually chosen, will be a vehicle for much of students' technology learning.

This Fashion Portal project is different from other collaborative projects in a number of significant ways. For one thing it is a cross-class (cross-TEAM) collaboration. There are not many Ed Tech collaborations combining first year and second year graduate students. It can be beneficial if we want it to be. To maximize the benefit of working in a cross-TEAM collaboration we will have to be clever about how to collaborate. It is proposed that the Fashion Portal collaboration members connect with each other, regularly using web-conferencing. It is the same technology, after all, that we are trying to install between the two classrooms (albeit with different variables). In other words let's use the technology (i.e. learn the technology) so we can build the technology for two high schools in Long Island and in Romania. Grant money may be available to purchase webcams for all of the collaborators. The grant application describes the project from another perspective and may answer questions.

The Fashion Portal project is meant to be the first of (hopefully) many"classroom-to-classroom portals" that will be created in the future. That's the other benefit of creating a cross-TEAM collaboration. It's like a relay race; one class hands the baton to the next. Future classroom-to-classroom portals may have different themes (other than Fashion) and different project objectives (other than Global Water). All portals, however, will share some things. They will maximize the benefits of the collaborative, interactive capabilities provided by the CtCP technology and all portals will be a vehicle of peace, i.e. exchange/build "peace poles," etc..

More information about the Fashion Portal and the "classroom-to-classroom portal" project can be found at some of the links below.

PS: Take a look at this 1959 application of wireless technology.