by Mabel Thurmon
With funding ($139,900) from the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the University of Illinois, NCSA, UIUC, and UIC are working as a team to perfect the Illinois Education Link ( EduLinK- 12) project. Their goal is "about where to go on the information superhighway," says Carolyn Dahl, project administrator of EduLinK-12 and a department head of UIUC's Office of Continuing Education and Public Service. "We are working to link university faculty and students with teachers and their classes to identify network-based curriculum resources."
Two main resources are Illinois Learning Mosaic and Internet resources in mathematics, science, and technology education. The team uses various methods to train teachers from three targeted state schools: Mahomet Junior and Senior High Schools, Mahomet; Lincoln School, Springfield; and Jackson Language Academy, Chicago. The essential methods include documentation, one-on-one mentoring, and classroom instruction.
Professors from the College of Education at the UIC campus are working with eight teachers at the Jackson Language Academy. Sandy Levin, project coordinator of EduLinK-12 and NCSA education specialist, teaches a class entitled "Information Technologies in the K-12 Classroom" at UIUC's College of Education.
Forty-five teachers participated in Levin's class during spring semester 1995. Computer skills among the trainees varied widely. Levin teaches her classes using video teleconferencing. With "CU- See me," participants see and talk to each other via video. Levin has also started to train her class in how to collect curriculum resources through a site on the World Wide Web. An EduLinK-12 Home Page was created by Steven Jai Vasaune, NCSA network information specialist (E&O). By using the Web site, teachers can directly ask for assistance and find specific resources on the Internet. Vasaune says the Web site "is only a skeleton" that will provide more information soon.
According to Levin, the first stage of the project is training. "Training will help these teachers to train other teachers and their students how to find the curriculum resources they need by using the Internet," she says.
Some teachers have begun using the information learned in Levin's class. Before Levin's spring course ended, Karen Thompson, a district technology trainer at Springfield, had started teaching teachers at Lincoln School to use the Internet to establish their own Web pages. She also taught them how to find resources for their teaching programs. "The training session was really helpful," Thompson says. "It is essential that we continue the EduLinK-12 project to help teachers provide student access to techniques of knowledge acquisition that are important to the educational process."
"The project is currently funded for only one year [September 1994 to August 1995]," says Dahl, "but we are working toward extension." Levin hopes that through EduLinK-12, NCSA, UIUC, and UIC will help the community schools build a network so that they can enter the electronic learning age.
Mabel Thurmon is a freelance writer.