Honorable Mention - 1998 EPSS Design Contest

  Computer Curriculum Corp.  EdMAP 

1. Purpose:

Traditionally, teaching has been a very isolating profession. Teachers are required to perform many jobs with little support from the district office and/or modern technology. They have little chance to either share their work with their peers or receive adequate coaching from district administrators.  Successful teachers have learned to be self-sufficient and make the best with what they can find to support their instruction.

EdMAP is a large scale, enterprise-wide database specifically designed for the development and management of instruction and assessment within a school district. Its purpose is to provide an environment where teachers throughout a district can plan instruction, collaborate, have easy access to resources, and store and share best practices in instruction.

2. Solution:

EdMAP was designed by teachers for teachers. The interface is intuitive to technology novices as well as experienced computer users. Each user logs into their own virtual personal workspace, regardless of the computer they logged in from.

Figure 1-EdMAP Workspace

Once in the workspace, teachers have tools available which provide access to different types of information that have traditionally been scattered across a district or isolated in one teacher’s classroom. Tools include access to databases of national and state standards, local objectives, model units of instruction and assessment, as well as a district’s resources such as library books, software, or even web sites.

All of the data can be linked to form relationships. This means a tremendous saving in time finding content or resources to support classroom instruction. One example is a teacher who wishes to deliver a unit on the solar system. Instead of having to develop one from scratch, she searches for a unit on the solar system that was already developed by another teacher in the district. Once found, she copies it to her workspace. She then drags one of the fields from the unit record onto the resources tool. All resources associated with that unit pop up. Next she does the same to find assessment instruments for that unit. By dragging and dropping the same unit record field onto the rubrics tool, she finds all rubrics previously developed in the district for use in her own classroom.

EdMAP also includes a plan book where teachers will "drag and drop" activities, units, resources, and rubrics onto it so they can plan their teaching calendars.   By establishing "links" to various curriculum components, teachers can plan out their year and have instant access to their units, lessons, resources, etc. as needed.  They can also share their plan books with others on the system.  For school principals and administrators, reports are available through the plan book to show coverage of the district objectives in actual instruction by the teachers based on their schedules of instruction. From the plan book, a teacher can run reports for her principal showing accountability for coverage of local objectives or state standards. Over time, there'll be access to existing student information databases for grading, record keeping, and reporting.

A messaging system is available for teachers to electronically send their units of instruction to peers across an entire district. These peers can then try out the units themselves and provide feedback to the originating teacher so she can modify it and re-distribute.

Though the system in itself can be considered and EPSS, an additional layer of support is available designed to support the performance of teachers.

Figure 2-Help system selection box

The help system includes content not only on technical system usage but also pedagogical information on best practices. There are varying  types of support available depending on the users experience and depth of need of the information.  Available are coaching sequences that provide an online tutorials in developing objectives sets and classroom activities.  For those who need quicker, in depth information, there are a series of guidelines to provide references and models for developing activities and rubrics (scoring guides).

Figure 3-Sample coaching sequence

The example shown above teaches district subject area coordinators how to research standards and create their own curriculum framework based on those standards. The example below shows one of the steps in the sequence.

Figure 4-Sample step in coaching sequence

And finally, there is a web-based discussion forum where teachers can go to discuss topics of interest between themselves and with teachers across districts. There is also a forum for district technical personnel who can ask for help directly from CCC. Occasionally, content experts will moderate discussions on topics of concepts and methods related to instruction and assessment. The forums thus serve as a growing knowledge base of empirical content.

Figure 5-EdMAP online forums

In addition, there will be a web-client so teachers can easily plan at home using the content in the database.

3. Prior State:

In the past, support of teachers’ performance was limited mainly to infrequent in-service workshops or short consulting sessions by district administrators. Rarely is there follow through and generally little documentation to support performance. Teachers often fend for themselves or collaborate on an ad hoc basis amongst them in the teacher lounge. It has only been in the last couple of years that technical infrastructures within schools and throughout districts have been installed which hold the promise of applications that can make teachers more efficient. These new networks still have few applications that can scale to connect an entire district and support their teachers.

In terms of curriculum support, each district creates its own curriculum guides. These guides are often ignored by teachers because of a lack of training and on-going support by the district in coaching teachers on how to use them in the development of their classroom activities and assessments.

4. User Profile:

Users of the system range from district administrators, subject area coordinators, principals and teachers. Both job-related and computer experience varies tremendously across these groups. There will be teachers who have 15-20 years teaching experience with the district, others will be fresh out of school or only a few years of teaching experience. Most will be college educated many with advanced degrees. There will be those teachers who have not yet finished their education but work as substitutes or on emergency credentials.

One attribute is their commitment to teaching. Another is their lack of enterprise-wide applications such as EdMAP and computer use in general.

5. Results:

There are now four installations of EdMAP in districts around the country. Training for both district administrators and teachers has been conducted. What we've observed so far (and read from training evaluation forms) that teachers see the value in the system long term. Many have said that they can't wait for the system to be fully populated. We noticed learning how to navigate the system and create data has been very short. In the workshops, teachers have the option of developing their instruction in other applications, such as word processors. Many, though, chose to work directly in the EdMAP database.

We believe teacher-planning time will be cut dramatically and the performance of teachers will improve as a result of the ability to share best practices amongst themselves and receive professional development online.

Submitted by Harry Wittenberg,
Director of Performance Support,
Education Enterprise Group, CCC,
hwittenberg@ccceeg.com,
408.541.3225