The goals of the NSF ROLE grant at Virginia Tech center on using online tools for supporting teacher professional resource management for Montgomery County and Giles County Public School teachers. While the project focuses initially on science and mathematics teachers, we are not limiting participants to these disciplines. The hope is that the resources developed will be usefully disseminated to a wide variety of other teachers in the region and possibly beyond.
We are proceeding with the assumption that the professional language, the formal and tacit technical resources, and the innovative and successful methods and practices in which teachers engage can emerge and be made visible through the development of motivating and interesting activities and tools involving innovative computer network technologies.
We also assume that meaningful activities will arise out of a commitment to participatory design processes with teachers. We assume that we must begin with those ideas and visions provided by teachers, but we realize that we must also inform, negotiate, and interact with teachers about the functionality and potential of networked computer technologies.
In addition, we assume that the tools are for doing teachers' work, and this work involves tacit, informal, and unwritten or unarticulated rules, knowledge, and practical methods and techniques. Thus, we assume that collaboration with or sharing of resources can be helped by facilitating sharing and communication in communities with common work and purposes.
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