TIM'S CURRENT ISSUE NUMBER 5

MIT ADAPTS FREE ONLINE COURSES FOR HIGH SCHOOLS
Primary topic channel: 21st century skills
From eschools news staff and wire service reports
Thursday November 29, 2007

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a new web site with free online resources that aim to improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instruction at the high school level. Highlights for high school is designed to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. They site encourages teachers to use, redistribute and make modifications for non commercial use.

Highlights for High School features more than 2,600 video and audio clips, animations, lecture notes, and assignments taken from actual MIT courses. The site organizes these resources to match the Advanced Placement physics, biology, and calculus curricula. Demonstrations, simulations, and animations give educators engaging ways to present STEM concepts, while videos illustrate MIT's hands-on approach to the teaching of these subjects
Thomas Magnanti, former dean of the School of Engineering at MIT, chaired the committee that developed the site.
"As has been well documented, the U.S. needs to invest more in secondary education, particularly in the STEM fields. MIT, as a leading institution of science and technology, has an obligation to help address the issue," he said.
More than 10,000 teachers and 5,000 students visit the site each month. MIT is looking into organizing an MIT secondary-education mentor corps to work with high school educators.

I visited the site and found it remarkably easy to navigate, very clear definitions of the courses, and all around user friendly. I have already emailed this course to a friend in the high school and another professor in NYIT. Introductory, AP, knowledge in Action, hands on learning, high school courses developed by MIT students, and other MIT resources for high school are the easy to navigate subtitles that open the site to explore. I think this is one of the best websites I have had the pleasure of exploring.

http://http//www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=50758;_hbguid=2fe71869-7611-4edb-8f76-1d460f3866e9