Welcome to the
Online Professional Development for Teachers
Quick Tour!

Online technologies can extend educators' opportunities for professional development through e-learning courses, online mentoring, web-based sharing of resources, and online professional learning communities. Online technologies provide a powerful new tool to enhance and extend teacher quality programs, making available content-rich and classroom-connected resources in ways that bridge time and distance.

This Tour introduces the use of Online Professional Development (OPD) Courses. It describes the most common approaches to OPD, examines one approach in detail, and shows how different online media work together to deliver a rich learning experience.

During the tour, you will often be referred to the Building Algebraic Thinking course, developed by EDC. You will be able to examine the course structure and review the content — readings, activities, and videos — and read sample conversations from the discussion board.

This Online Professional Development Tour was developed by the EDC Center for Online Professional Education with funding from the National Science Foundation. The demonstration course uses videos and applets from courses developed by EDC for PBS TeacherLine, with permission of PBS.

Preparing for the Tour

To run the Quick Tour, your browser needs software accessories, called plug-ins, which are all available free of charge.

• To view the basic Quick Tour and some of the course content, you need the Director Shockwave plug-in from Macromedia. If the image below is animated, then you already have Director Shockwave.
  
  



• To view the entire Building Algebraic Thinking content, including video, online software and all readings, you need additional plug-ins. Click Check Your Computer below to display a list that shows which plug-ins you need and where to get them.

Once your plug-ins are installed...

 

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