HUBS Education

HUBS Education is the "S" of HUBS, working to transforming the K12 schools of the four-state region into high-technology centers of excellence and producing graduates with the skills necessary to support the hospitals, universities, and businesses of the 21st century. HUBS Education (HUBS Ed) was initially funded by means of a $5 million, two-year challenge grant from the U. S. Department of Education.

HUBS Ed Programs

Education Portal (www.hubscentral.org)

At its inception, HUBS Ed focused on providing professional development and school-to-home communication capabilities through the Internet. Professional development is supported by a large and growing database of thematic units, lesson plans, and multi-media activities, created by educators in the HUBS Ed network. Materials in the database range from 6th grade medieval history to elementary Spanish (including sound files of proper pronunciation.) The HUBS Ed portal provides access to LearnNC, a Web site which contains thousands of validated lesson plans and Internet resources.

The HUBS Ed portal, including links to these exemplary materials, is offered at no cost to every educator in the HUBS Ed network.

The HUBS Ed portal provides a means to communicate via email, chat, and threaded discussion groups. Educators can exchange ideas and information with their peers in the four-state area, and with their students and parents. The portal makes it easy for parents to access school information ranging from calendar and homework assignments to assessment information and grades.

The Education Portal is supported by a modular, Java-based infrastructure that provides the basic database, communication, and collaboration capabilities. The infrastructure is designed in a "software back-plane" structure in which individual components can be plugged in multiple ways to provide nearly custom features. This middleware is designed to be capable of scaling up to support other HUBS programs as well.

For help getting started with the HUBS Education Portal, visit:
http://www.crsd.org/buildings/staffdev/hubs_e-mail.htm

HUBS Ed Collaborative Programs

HUBS Ed encourages collaborative participation from school districts in the four-state area. HUBS Ed has partnered with school districts in developing programs such as:

• Palm Pilot Project: HUBS Ed is collaborating with school districts in placing hand-held PDAs into the K12 classroom. Keystone and Garnet Valley School Districts (PA) are putting PDAs into the hands of kindergarten and 6th grade mathematics teachers, respectively. Teachers use PDAs to record assessments of their students against sets of observables, or criteria for education success. Observables are skills and behaviors that indicate accomplishment of educational goals and have been developed by the HUBS Ed school partners for 6th grade mathematics and kindergarten-level skills. Generally, observables are tied to local or state education standards. The PDAs allow rapid, paperless and non-intrusive observations to be made at the moment the behavior is observed. The observation data in the PDA is then downloaded onto the classroom PC where reports are to be generated. HUBS has provided Palm Pilot devices and software technology that allows the assessment results to be viewed by a parent on the HUBS Ed portal via an Internet browser,

Other PDA projects involve recording deportment, attendance and basic grade-book capabilities. The PDA project represents an integration of existing hardware (the Palm Pilot) and software (Learner Profile from Sunburst, Inc.) The PDA project has captured the imagination of many of HUBS Ed's partner school districts.

• Extending the School Day (Virtual Classrooms): The Norristown, PA, school district has a diverse mix of ethnic and socio-economic groups. Although of modest size (6,700 students), it faces the same problems as much larger urban school systems. Through the HUBS Ed Extending the School Day program, this school district has become a test site to determine how technology can enhance education on both ends of the social continuum. HUBS Ed worked closely with Norristown to design and carry out an experiment to measure the effects of technology on the school success of students, particularly students from low-income households. The experiment will attempt to extend the school day by teacher-student chat sessions, interactive tests and educational materials available both on the Internet and the Norristown system
  
  HUBS Ed provided computers to be placed into the homes of developmentally challenged students and created a suite of software tools (in close cooperation with the school system) to monitor computer use and provide access for the students to Internet resources. Careful measurements will be made to determine the effects of this technology on reducing the "digital divide."
• Student Courseware--Juried Assessments: 6th grade teachers in Morrisville, PA, are creating a medieval history unit that is entirely electronic. Using the HUBS Ed portal, students will create projects in the form of Internet pages. These pages will be evaluated and graded by a jury of medieval history experts around the world through the Internet. This is an example of what HUBS Ed views as an important trend toward completely electronic curriculums in the K12 schools.
• Electronic Lesson Plan and Activity Development:The Camden, NJ, school district is developing electronic thematic units, lesson plans, and activities for their 3rd grade curriculum. Accessing the information through the Internet makes lesson plans and other materials developed by the best Camden teachers easily available to all the teachers in Camden, as well as across the four-state region. This project has attracted the attention of other schools in the HUBS Ed network. Morrisville School District, for example, is using a Camden lesson plan in its 6th grade learning center. This is just one example of how HUBS Ed is bringing school districts together to collaborate and share educational resources.

Creating an Improved Learning Environment

These HUBS Ed initiatives are providing forums for enhanced communications. The HUBS Ed portal contains special parental access and home pages that allows the parent to keep tabs on his student's progress, homework assignments, and class calendar. The PDA project has a goal of providing timely assessment information for parents. And, partnered with HUBS, school districts such as are creating their own individualized communications programs to share information among teachers, students and parents.

With the Internet portal as the primary offering, HUBS Ed is creating an improved learning environment where teachers, parents and students can collaboratively chart their course to success.

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