The Learning Network
A collaboration with the Blackstone Valley Educational Collaborative, Massachusetts.
Overview
The Ecotarium provided a professional development workshop series and classroom support to teams of teachers from school districts in the Massachusetts Blackstone Valley as part of the Blackstone Valley Educational Collaborative's Learning Network.
Summary
The focus of the Learning Network was the coordination of quality professional development through which teachers created interactive curriculum resources based in the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. Through the EcoTarium workshop series during the 1998-99 school year sixteen teachers received professional development on the integration of computer technologies into classroom teaching and learning as they worked to develop lesson units based in the Blackstone Valley.
Teams of K-8 teachers from the participating Blackstone Valley school districts were involved in the EcoTarium professional development series, which included forty-six hours of after-school and full-day workshops.
The goals of the project were to:
- Provide participants with models of how to integrate computer technologies into classroom teaching and learning.
- Provide teachers with opportunities to experience these models from the learner's perspective.
- Provide hands-on opportunities to experience ways to utilize desktop publishing applications, the World Wide Web, Inspiration, spreadsheets, digital imaging techniques, and listservs in classroom teaching and learning.
- Provide participants with opportunities to participate in model lessons -- based in the pedagogies and content of the Massachusetts State Curriculum Frameworks -- which utilize the history and/or human and physical landscape of the Blackstone Valley.
- Provide participants with opportunities and time to network and collaborate as they develop a new or modify an existing lesson unit which integrates computer technologies and the history and/or human and physical landscape of the Blackstone Valley into a grade-appropriate lesson grounded in the state curriculum frameworks.
Results
The lesson units created by the Innovative Curriculum Teams are now available on the WWW as part of the Blackstone Valley Learning Network Virtual Museum which can be found at http://www.bvlearnnet.org.
History
The EcoTarium was approached by the Blackstone Valley Educational Collaborative to provide the professional development for the teams of teachers developing innovative curriculum units in the Learning Network. The project was funded from March 1998 through June 1999 by a Massachusetts DOE Statewide Imapct Grant.