Professional Development

BloomBoard Intros Curated Collections with Micro-Credentials

• By Leila Meyer
• 01/27/16

BloomBoard, a professional development platform for educators, has launched a new site that combines curated collections of learning resources with micro-credentials.

Inspired by the content curation capabilities of popular sites like Pinterest, BloomBoard created an alternative community exclusively for K-12 educators. The site is organized around the concept of collections, which are groups of learning resources focused on specific topics, such as Using Children's Literature To Teach Writing or Effective Strategies for Teaching Students with Disabilities. Teachers can sign up for free to create their own collections on topics of professional interest and follow collections created by other teachers. According to a news release from the company, "Collections are reviewed by BloomBoard's team of master educators to ensure each resource can help a teacher succeed in addressing that problem of practice."

Ella Bowling, a middle school teacher in Maysville, KY, prefers BloomBoard to general interest sites such as Pinterest or Google to find high-quality educational resources. "BloomBoard provides a better way for me to leverage the expertise of the educator community and quickly find solutions to the challenges that come up in my daily practice," she said in a prepared statement.

In November 2015, BloomBoard announced its partnership with Digital Promise, a nonprofit organization authorized by Congress to spur innovation in education. BloomBoard and Digital Promise launched a micro-credential system for educators that provides an alternative method of recognizing educators' professional development accomplishments. Now, teachers can earn micro-credentials in a wide variety of topics through BloomBoard's new site, and those micro-credentials can then be translated into professional development credit hours. "BloomBoard and Digital Promise are already approved for statewide credit hour equivalency in Texas, Illinois and North Carolina, with additional states expected to provide approval in the coming months," stated a news release from BloomBoard.

In addition to the new site for K-12 educators, BloomBoard will continue to offer its private content tools for schools and districts.