USING AN ON-LINE COMMUNITY TO CONNECT TEACHERS ACROSS TEXAS; LESSONS FROM THE TXESS REVOLUTION

The TeXas Earth and Space Science (TXESS) Revolution is a professional development program aimed at high school teachers who are preparing to teach a new, 12th-grade level Earth and Space Science course in Texas. Teachers come to UT Austin for four professional development workshops over 2 years. Currently in our third year, the program has graduated one cohort of 55 teachers, has a second cohort half-way through, and third cohort starting Fall ’09. The State’s new Earth and Space Science course now has a curriculum, and can be taught starting fall ’09, but is not required until fall ’11.

Teachers come to Austin from communities all over Texas. In order to keep them connected between workshops and throughout the school year, we use a variety of on-line tools. We created a web-space we call the virtual café where teachers can blob, share lessons, ask advice, and retrieve lessons and podcasts of our workshops. Here, teachers have collaborated between far-flung towns to create lessons together. And they have shared their work with others. As organizers, we bring new information to the teachers, and facilitate on-line discussions about topics of interest in the geosciences, and in Texas education. We have also taken advantage of free internet tools to keep in touch and to facilitate planning an information spreading. We use Google Groups for the project listserve and for timely discussion points. That gives us access to the calendar feature as well, so it is easy to keep the whole group up-to-date. The teachers of our first cohort started a Facebook group to keep in touch after the final workshop, to maintain the strong connections they formed.

The on-line communities have had both successes and failures. We found that some teachers used them extensively, and others hardly at all. We have worked to make them more engaging and useful, and will share those discoveries.