NCSA NEWS

EdGrid Pulls Together Collaborative Teams

released October 3, 2000

EdGrid is the easy-to-remember moniker for a program entitled "Moving K-12 Teachers into 21st Century Science with 21st-Century Technology: Building the Educational Grid for Pre-Service Training." This program exists to research, develop, and promote applications of modeling and visualization in science and mathematics education. According to NCSA's Lisa Bievenue, principal investigator for the project, "EdGrid aims to develop ways to help teacher education systemically change for the future."

Two EdGrid initiatives directly support the program's goal. One initiative is to coordinate a national meeting in October, the Modeling and Visualization Workshop. The second initiative is to develop and support models that systemically integrate modeling and visualization into teacher preparation programs at colleges and universities. This initiative is funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Education Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PTTT) program. EdGrid receives additional funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the Illinois State Board of Education, and the National Science Foundation. EdGrid is also a project of the NSF-funded Education, Outreach, and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (EOT-PACI).

Seven collaborative teams pull together in-service K-12 teachers, education professors, and other researchers from across the country. These teams are working on a variety of projects to develop innovative technology-based instructional tools and curricula for teaching science and math. Coordinating the collaborative teams are:

• the School of Education at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and Alabama Supercomputing Program to Inspire computational Research in Education (ASPIRE) at the University of Alabama-Huntsville.
• Biology Student Workbench, with Beloit College as its testbed.
• College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with high schools in Hinsdale, IL, as its testbed.
• Lesley College, a primarily online college based in Massachusetts.
• Maryland Virtual High School and its collaboration between K-12 science teachers and university education professors.
• Shodor Education Foundation and middle schools in North and South Carolina.
• SRI International and its toolkit of learner-centered visualization and modeling components.

For more information about EdGrid and its collaborative teams go to http://www.eot.org/edgrid/.

 

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