ComPADRE

Posted Mon, 08/02/2010 - 11:33am by bmason
Grant Number: 
0532798
Target Audiences: 
Physics teachers, faculty, and students from middle school through graduate school, as well as informal education.
Partners: 
American Association of Physics Teachers, American Physical Society, Society of Physics Students, Physics Education Research Topical Group, Space Telescope Science Institute, SERC, AAAS, MERLOT, European Physics Education Network. Curriculum developers - Open Source Physics, Tom Henderson (Physics Classroom), Oregon State Paradigms Project, University of Colorado SEI, University of Colorado PhET, Oregon State Paradigms Project, University of Maine, etc.

This update covers the time from 11/2009 to 7/2010.

A significant amount of development time has gone into enhancing our collaboration and social networking tools. This has included updates to personal and shared collections, connections to social networking sites, and the development of editorial and user tools for providing more information to our members and visitors. We have also been working on several efforts to connect with educational standards in various forms. One difficulty with this work is the need to make connections to standards other than the Benchmarks and NSES because of their lack of detail at the high school physics level. The College Board's standards for college success, for example, provide a better match for this large part of our audience.

Collaboration with and cataloging of the results of curriculum development projects is increasing. We are also getting more requests to be the dissemination partner on new curriculum development projects. In other important partnerships, we continue to provide web services for a number of conferences, allowing us to hold the content presented.

We have recently signed an MOU with the Space Telescope Science Institute to collaborate on web presentation of astronomy education resources. This will connect the NASA-developed resources of the STScI with the broader collection of ComPADRE astronomy resources. The STScI group will take an editorial role on the ComPADRE astronomy collection while we will provide the technical, library, web development, and editorial tools. We have also begun collaborations with the TNS on providing more physics and physical science resources for the Strand Maps and Curriculum Customization Service (CCS) projects.