Title: Harnessing Technology as a Tool for Your School

Date: Wednesday, October 3

Time: 4 - 5 p.m. (Eastern)

Description: Learn how to harness technology so that your teachers can do what they do best—plan and teach—and your computers handle what they do best—compile data that helps both teachers and students. 

See how ASSISTments, a free public service of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), helps teachers deliver assignments (either ones they select or ones they personalize for themselves) using the ASSISTments builder. You’ll learn how students working on an assignment learn if their work is correct and get hints and new questions, and then how teachers get feedback on the whole class’s results. Students and teachers then act on that information.

Presenter:

Cristina L. Heffernan, is a former middle school mathematics teacher with classroom experience working with urban and suburban populations and in public and private schools. She also has extensive experience as a math coach, a workshop leader/trainer, and a professional learning community facilitator in Boston and Worcester.

In 2003, Cristina and Neil Heffernan developed the idea of creating a website for students to get practice help and for teachers to obtain reports. Ms. Heffernan, who has worked on the ASSISTments project ever since, is the key teacher trainer and subject-matter expert on the project. Having worked on four funded grants related to ASSISTments, she supervises a team of 12 undergraduates working on the project at WPI.  She also teaches a course to teachers on Data Driven Instruction Using Technology, as part of the WPI Master of Mathematics for Educators program. She currently is the program manager in the GK-12 project, helping teachers, and WPI PhD students in computer science work together.  Her most recent grant is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to help scale ASSISTments to 1 million students. She holds a BS in Arts in Teaching and an MEd in Mathematics Education.