PedConnect: an intelligent assistant for teacher social networking

Social networking has gained immense traction in many areas, including teaching and learning. Networking sites for teachers aim to facilitate teacher communication and information sharing, but fall short of their potential. In order to support more effective use of online resources and better communication among teachers, we develop a suite of new user modeling and recommendation capabilities within a middle school teacher networking site. We foster collaboration among novice and experienced teachers when they share similar interests, enabling new mentoring relationships, and promote the use of relevant educational resources. We illustrate our approach with an implemented system called PedConnect that analyzes user activities and presents intelligent suggestions for collaboration and resource use.