Three eMINTS National Center staff members spent two weeks in Sydney and Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia in February 2008, providing professional development to a group of more than 20 Australian educators. They provided eMINTS train-the-trainer type training to Aussie instructional technology specialists who will then begin training eMINTS teachers in their home regions in New South Wales, Australia.
The Aussie educators who are preparing to become eMINTS instructional specialists include primary (elementary) and secondary (middle and high school) teachers as well as principals and other educational specialists. Each Aussie eMINTS specialist will work with teachers across the region to help them become official eMINTS teachers through a program called “e-iteach.”
This partnership is the result of more than two years of communication and sharing that began with a presentation made by eMINTS Director, Monica Beglau, at the British Educational Technology event (BETT) in London in 2006. Carole McDiarmid, Regional Director of the Western New South Wales region, was in the audience. She followed up with a visit to the U.S. and to eMINTS classrooms in the St. Louis, MO, area in November 2006. Principal John Willing (Forbes Public School in Forbes, NSW) and his wife, Lois, visited Columbia, MO, in July 2007 as part of John’s Microsoft scholarship to visit U.S. schools and programs. Columbia Public Schools hosted the Willings in several eMINTS summer school classrooms.
In February 2008, eMINTS staff traveled some 28,000 miles to visit their colleagues 'down under' and begin a formal relationship between the eMINTS National Center and New South Wales Department of Education. The Aussie facilitators are planning a trip to Missouri in 2009 as part of their second year of eMINTS training and to visit eMINTS classrooms in the U.S.
For more information, visit the eMINTS National Center website (www.emints.org) and click on the gold star in the lower right-hand corner of the map of Australia.
The eMINTS National Center is a non-profit, independent business unit of the University of Missouri. eMINTS offers professional development programs created by educators for educators.
eMINTS changes how teachers teach and students learn. Its instructional model provides a research-based approach to organizing instruction and can be implemented in any subject area at any level.
The eMINTS National Center is a collaborative program developed by the University of Missouri, Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Missouri Department of Higher Education.
