REVIEW: Laura, this is an excellent idea. I wasn’t sure ‘til the very end that you weren’t already moving with this. I hear what Troy is saying about the possibility of doing this on Moodle, but I somehow think a bespoked system would be a better fit. The fact that you have this niche market is actually a great strength. You want to make the perfect support tool for that community and be able to control and tweak the platform.
If you act now and do it well you could own this niche. And it is big enough to support a business. I think this could really take off on Kickstarter, but you have to better target the parents and you have to sell the idea… essentially the idea of Canada, and all the hope and promise of a bilingual, multicultural country. And the idea of connecting the French immersion programs from across the country (just videos of French immersion kids across the country smiling and looking diverse and Canadian). Get the parents on board with Kickstarter and then the government support will be much easier. They are desperate to associate themselves with a success story.
I recently came across an interesting teacher-development project that you should look at called the Inquiry Learning Forum. The power of looking at a project like this not just as a website but as a Socio-Technological Interactive Network is actually amazing. See Barab (2004) “Using Activity Theory to Conceptualize Online Community and Using Online Community to Conceptualize Activity Theory”
As a national strategy, I agree that New Brunswick is a key province, our only truly bilingual one. You can’t do everything, but do NB and BC and figure out how to build that bridge and the rest will fall in place.
Awesome!