Innovation Exchange: Exploring the Portability of Systemic Reform
The Innovation Exchange work builds on the success of two NSF-funded technology-anchored curriculum reform efforts: the work of New Jersey's Union City Schools with EDC' s Center for Children and Technology, as well as the work of the Center for Learning Technologies (LeTUS) and the Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (hi-ce) group at the University of Michigan. This is an effort to develop a collaboration between schools in Detroit that have been working with the hi-ce technology-supported science curriculum materials, and schools in Union City with a long history of successful technology-based systemic reform efforts.
The central questions we wish to explore are how innovative and effective models of technology-anchored teaching and learning can transfer across other contexts and how teachers, administrators, and researchers can collaborate to support, sustain, and gain knowledge from such endeavors.
The primary products of the Innovation Exchange work is an extensive re-working of the LeTUS developed "Communicable Disease" unit into a broad-based interdisciplinary unit named "Cooties" that is currently being taught to all 8 th grade students in Union City, NJ. Detroit teachers helped introduce the unit to the Union City teachers, and created and led a professional development workshop for all Union City teachers who would enact the unit. In addition, hi-ce's on-line professional development environment, KNOW, was used to facilitate enactment by Union City teachers and communication between the two districts.
Funder: |
National Science Foundation |
Principal Investigators: |
Barry Fishman |
Partner Organizations: |
Center for Children and Technology |
Status: |
Completed in August 2003 |