Online Communities

The MathScape: Seeing and Thinking Mathematically Curriculum Center provides support to school districts using this curriculum. The center offers training institutes and workshops, hosts a Web site offering online support, develops implementation materials, and disseminates information about the curriculum’s effectiveness.

This project designed a professional development model and materials that enabled teachers to successfully support students with disabilities in regular mathematics classrooms. The model included workshops, example lesson adaptations, and school-based planning groups. Project staff worked with schools in the greater Boston area that used standards-based middle school mathematics curricula, such as MathScape and Connected Mathematics.

MA-TLC provides district leaders with professional development activities and ongoing support to help them establish the essential conditions for using technology effectively in their schools and districts. The program’s multifaceted approach integrates in-person institutes with online activities.

EDC provides training in online facilitation and course design for a leadership group in the Columbus Public School District, and prepares the group to establish an online professional development program based on EDC’s EdTech Leaders Online model. The project is developing online, Web-based, interactive activities for middle school math students and is preparing teachers to incorporate these activities into their classrooms.

This design study uses information technologies to enhance pre- and in-service professional development programs within National Science Foundation’s Math and Science Partnerships (MSPs). The project informs the MSPs about online tools and techniques, consults with a set of MSP projects, develops selected MSPs’ capacity to incorporate effective online professional development, collaborates with MSP evaluators that use online technologies, and assesses the prospects for conducting further work in this area.

E-Learning for Educators, funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Ready to Teach program, seeks to establish successful, sustainable, statewide online professional development programs that address teacher quality and student achievement goals. Through its EdTech Leaders® Online program, EDC supports this initiative by establishing a cadre of online professional development instructors and course developers within each state.

EDC is providing technical assistance to the youth media field and Time Warner’s community grantees, building the capacity of these programs to measure their impact more effectively. Activities include individual consultation with grantees, training in a range of evaluation strategies, dissemination of promising evaluation practices, and the development of a cross-site research agenda.

The Power Users of Technology Initiative was launched by EDC and the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships (UNFIP) at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City in December, 2004.