About EWIT

EWIT (The Educators' Website for Information Technology) is a learning community of academic and technical educators and community-based and business partnerships. EWIT supports the innovative use of IT skills and academic standards to enhance learning and to develop IT skills for work.

The purpose of this website is to assist academic and technical communities to form a seamless system that helps:

• all students develop IT skills for learning
• all learners develop core IT skills needed for working in the non-IT jobs
• students develop the IT skills in jobs and careers of their choice

This website provides tools and resources in key program areas within such a system, including:

• Skill standards
• Integration of academic with career and technical standards
• IT Pathway Pipeline model (see Suggested Reading)
• IT Curriculum and Assessment

Our Projects

IT Applications Across Careers (ITAC)
The goal of this project - funded by the National Science Foundation - is to develop a common approach to the learning of IT applications across the 16 career clusters identified by the US Department of Education.

IT Career Cluster Initiative
Sponsored by the United States Department of Education and the National School to Work Office, the IT Career Cluster Initiative is a partnership of Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), and the National Alliance of Business (NAB) to create a national model and career cluster curricular framework for IT careers that involve the design, development, support and management of hardware, software, multimedia and systems integration services.

Techforce Initiative
The Techforce Initiative: Building IT School-to-Career Partnerships was a four-year(1998-2002) National School-to-Work Office-funded project, administered by Education Development Center, Inc. www.edc.org, the National Alliance of Business, and the Information Technology Association of America www.itaa.org. The goals of the Techforce Initiative were: to highlight and expand IT employer involvement in school-to-careers (STC); and to facilitate, support and promote the efforts of individuals and organizations committed to building IT-STC partnerships.

Clearinghouse Criteria

Standards Alignment
The resource should be aligned with the IT Career Development Model by addressing core IT skills at the Foundation level and/or more advanced technical skills at the Pathway level. It should also be aligned with appropriate national, state and district standards.

Quality Teaching Approaches
The resource should be appropriate for the indicated age group, grade level, and teaching context. Activities should be challenging and interesting, and make best use of IT to enhance/enrich the teaching and learning process. The text should avoid statements of bias and stereotyping by gender, ethnic groups, or other abilities.

Content Accuracy & Research Base
The resource should include links to quality indicators and standards (as mentioned above) and should be grounded in some research by the developer(s) as the relevance and appropriateness of the topics and approaches used. The resource should include full coverage of essential, current information in the selected topic, without errors or content gaps.

Organization
The resource should be easy to use and logically sequenced. It should flow in an orderly manner, using appropriate organizing tools (e.g., headings).The resource should include or describe all materials required for its successful implementation, such as handouts or bibliographic citations for resource materials.