CONCORD, Massachusetts, December 14, 2011 – The Concord Consortium ( www.concord.org ) has received a $2.5 million grant from Google.org to pave the way for digital curricula that model the "textbook of tomorrow."
"The digital revolution is finally arriving for education, but most examples out there still barely scratch the surface of what technology can offer. We're hard at work creating better, deeply digital learning experiences for science, mathematics, and engineering," explained the Concord Consortium President, Chad Dorsey. "By allowing students to perform virtual experiments with computational models, or gather and analyze data using probes and sensors, we're providing opportunities that reach far beyond today's basic digital textbooks. This grant from Google will help us bring the next generation of digital learning to teachers and students around the world."
The Concord Consortium is a non-profit R&D organization that develops and provides open source educational technology at no cost to students, teachers, and schools. This funding will increase access to the organization's award-winning Molecular Workbench software and curriculum. Students using browser-based devices will be able to study the science of atoms and molecules by experimenting with sophisticated computational models and collect real-time data via probes and sensors. These activities will form examples of next-generation—deeply digital—curricula.
The initial development of the Molecular Workbench was funded by a series of grants from the National Science Foundation. The Molecular Workbench was awarded a SPORE Prize by Science Magazine this year. The Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) has been established by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to "encourage innovation and excellence in education, as well as to encourage the use of high-quality on-line resources by students, teachers, and the public."
For more information about the Molecular Workbench, visit:
The Concord Consortium is a non-profit R&D organization in Concord, MA, dedicated to transforming education through technology. The organization has pioneered learning innovations for science, mathematics, and engineering since 1994. They have successfully developed activities using probes and sensors, computer-based models and simulations, online teacher professional development, the nation's first online high school (the Virtual High School), sustainable development education, and video case studies for teacher professional development.