Today at the 2007 National Educational Computing Conference, Houghton Mifflin Learning Technology (HMLT), a division of Houghton Mifflin Company, and Microsoft Corp. announced a worldwide strategic alliance designed to make it easier for pre-K–12 and higher-education students, parents, teachers and administrators to access HMLT’s award-winning educational resources. As part of the agreement, HMLT will develop its next-generation flagship Learning Village® instructional Web portal on the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0 and utilize Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and the Microsoft Learning Gateway. Combining the strengths of both companies, the alliance opens up opportunities for educators to integrate all of their content, applications and resources from one central source, using technology to manage and monitor their Web-content needs districtwide. ...

Learning Village delivers curricula and content in a unified, personalized and education-relevant Web environment for hundreds of thousands of K–12 teachers, students, administrators and parents, providing a central point for accessing curriculum, lesson plans, communication, collaboration, best practices, teaching and professional development. The infrastructure of the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 and SharePoint technologies will help HMLT connect educators and students to the best digital content and resources available while helping to reduce support costs and enhancing HMLT’s ability to deploy future solutions as software and services.

With Learning Village on the Microsoft Learning Gateway portal, students will need to log on only once to access their homework assignments. Once they’ve completed their work, they can then drop it into a “virtual backpack” for their teacher to grade. Parents are provided with the opportunity to actively participate in their children’s education, all through the same system.