Digital Teaching Conference in N.O. To Provide Technical Instruction for Teachers
By Anonymous
The Virtue Foundation will hold a Digital Teaching Professional Development Conference in partnership with the University of California-Berkeley and the University of New Orleans for teachers in nine schools districts affected by Katrina and Rita.
The event is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday at the University of New Orleans. About 30 teachers from across Louisiana who received laptops from the Virtue Foundation are expected to participate.
The conference is designed to provide state-of-the-art digital teaching skills to teachers participating in the Virtue Foundation Katrina Education Initiative, a technology-enabled educational pilot program to provide 21st century learning opportunities for children in storm-affected schools.
Initially launched in 2005, this initiative was expanded in September 2006 when Virtue’s corporate partners, Apple and Microsoft, donated laptops and software licenses worth more than $1 million to schools in the nine school districts, spearheading the development of a state-of-the-art technology-enabled educational model for students throughout the state.
The conference will introduce teachers to tested software and resources for online classroom activities such as digital storytelling, poetry and narrative exercises and other math, science and English language arts activities designed by the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Education in collaboration with schools and partners across the nation.
The goal of the day-long conference is to provide a laboratory for teachers and other educators to expand on their digital teaching skills and to share the experiences and teaching methods that they have garnered during the initial phases of the Virtue Foundation Katrina Education Initiative Pilot. Feedback from the conference as well as on-going feedback from the pilot program will be shared with key educational stakeholders, including the Governor’s Office, which has recently introduced a similarly-designed, expanded digital learning initiative dubbed: “Turn On To Learning.”
In support of “Turn On To Learning,” Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco recently included a $5 million investment in technology and digital learning as part of her educational package for fiscal year 2007. The appropriation, if approved by the Legislature, would fund a research and development pilot program that provides about 3,000 laptop computers to two sixth-grade classrooms in every school district in the state.
The Virtue Foundation is a charitable organization dedicated to empowering women and children worldwide through education, economic, and health care initiatives.
Credit: CityBusiness Staff Report
(Copyright 2007 Dolan Media Newswires)
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