The following post has been written by Hollylynne S. Lee, who can be contacted at Hollylynne@ncsu.edu.
Here at the Friday Institute at NC State, I have been very busy working with a team in designing a Massive Open Online Course for Educators (MOOC-ED) that is focused on “Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations”. The course is designed to develop the pedagogy and content understanding for teachers (preservice, practicing, college-level teaching assistants, and teacher educators) in middle school, high school, and AP/ intro college levels. There will be many choices and options in the course for teachers to focus their learning around content that they teach.
The course will launch March 9th and run for 8 weeks. Registration is FREE and there is an opportunity for practicing teachers to earn CEUs if they complete all activities in the course and do a project. It may be a great opportunity for teachers to work in teams to complete the course together.
Preservice teachers could complete activities in the course as part of assignments in an on-campus course or take it in addition to their on-campus courses to enhance their preparation to teach statistics.
If you teach a course or include units in your methods courses focused on teaching statistics, you may also want to engage with us in the MOOC-Ed to gain additional resources and ideas for your own courses.
In the course, participants will see many video-based examples of students and teachers engaging in statistics tasks, hear from a panel of experts on teaching statistics (Chris Franklin, Susan Friel, Webster West), learn about statistical habits of mind, be introduced to a framework for developing students’ statistical sophistication (adapted from GAISE), examine tasks, and engage with real data sets using new tools such as TuvaLabs and Codap with the option of using TinkerPlots or Fathom (which are accessible for free right now), or any other tool they are familiar with, such as StatCrunch. Now doesn’t that all sound fun? Especially if you also have the option of engaging in discussions with teachers and teacher educators from all around the world?
You can see a more detailed description of the course here:
I would appreciate it if you could spread the word about this course to your preservice teachers and local teacher contacts. I have attached a flyer that can be distributed.
I am excited to offer this professional development for teachers and teacher educators on a wide scale and hope that it can be used to enhance the teacher education efforts in universities and local school districts!
If you have any questions let me know!