Center for Advancement of STEM Education

The Center for Advancement of STEM Education (CASE), the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) and Nortel LearniT have partnered to prepare a cross-section of America's top K-12 educators to become 21st Century eTeachers™ of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Throughout the summer of 2007, CASE hosted five one-week workshops designed to help in-service teachers from 11 states adapt new ways of teaching STEM – ways that are more engaging and successful for learners.

• Note to participants in specific training programs:  Access your training materials in the Nortel LearniT Moodle, using your user name and password.
  

During the training, teachers became the students allowing them to actually participate in the hands-on activities. Subject matter experts from NIA connected the modules with resources from NASA and their own repositories to create new digital connections reinforcing 21st century source and reference-based learning.

NIA and Nortel LearniT partnered with CASE to show them how they can increase student engagement through their lessons by not only using hands-on modules but by taking advantage of what technology can do to support and enhance learning activities.

Working together, NIA and Nortel LearniT staffers led training with the educators to complete their hands-on module learning and to integrate technology activities into the process.

Project examples were produced by Nortel LearniT students, who worked alongside NIA educators to showcase the potential of an integrated technology approach. These examples include:

As with most training programs, participating educators arrived with a variety of technology skill levels. Efforts were made to connect each with the appropriate resources to accomplish the task of teaching integrated technology skills. Participants also benefited from 1) using content management tools, 2) publishing and collaborating with each other via the Nortel LearniT Moodle server, 3) learning about the new curriculum-focused interactive wiki tool, and 4) being introduced to the Nortel Multimedia Communications Server (MCS), which they will use throughout the 2007-08 school year.

Garrett College in western Maryland hosted the CASE workshops.