The Michigan Department of Education is now a State Education Partner with Thinkfinity, which is sponsored by the Verizon Foundation. If you haven’t heard of Thinkfinity, it is the new and improved Marco Polo sponsored by the Verizon Foundation. Through our partnership with Thinkfinity we will be offering free technology integration training for teachers.
We are currently looking for people interested in becoming field trainers, so they can start doing technology integration training for teachers in the winter/spring. Contact Karen Hairston at hairstonk@michigan.gov with your name, title, school/organization name, city, state, zip and e-mail address by November 26 for the January Online Field Trainer Training roster.
Related to this training, MDE has partnered with the Michigan e-Library and Wayne State University to develop a portal for K-12 teachers. It is called MORE — Michigan Online Resources for Educators and is located at http://more.mel.org.
What makes this portal unique is that all of the resources are aligned to the Michigan Content Expectations (K-12). Currently we have a couple thousand math and science resources in the site, we are working on adding resources for the other core areas. It is anticipated approximately 8,000 resources in the portal within a month. The first set of resources is from the Michigan Teacher Network, and the resources were manually aligned by Michigan teachers in the Summer of 2006. Once these are in, we will be aligning and adding or more than 55,000 resources available through our partnership with Thinkfinity.