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In the complicated landscape of school reform, where fads come and go and high-profile programs lose momentum and fade away, IBM's Reinventing Education program has been able to drive systemic change and higher student achievement. These successes have been achieved through a combination of critical factors, including strong partnerships, a willingness to change education rules and regulations, comprehensive teacher training, evaluation -- and the implementation of innovative technology solutions.
One essential solution created with our Reinventing Education partners is Riverdeep Learning Village. In 1994, IBM, in partnership with a number of its Reinventing Education grant partners, began building Learning Village, a suite of applications that support and foster communication and collaboration between parents, teachers, community members and students and that include rich databases of effective, standards-based instructional practices. Since that time, the technology has been continually improved to incorporate new ideas and to leverage advances in technology. This technology is now being used by more than 80,000 teachers in dozens of school districts in the United States, as well as school systems in Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Singapore.
In June 2001, in order to ensure that the technology would continue to improve and have appropriate support, IBM established a strategic partnership with Riverdeep Interactive Learning, Ltd. Riverdeep, the leading publisher of K-12 educational software, designed an enhanced, easier-to-navigate and more flexible version of the technology based on Websphere, IBM's middleware for web applications. This version is now being implemented in all appropriate Reinventing Education grant partner sites.
Riverdeep Learning Village™ is an instructional portal that leads to a world of opportunities for the education community. It serves as a single access point for communication, collaboration, teaching and professional development and includes powerful features that:
- Enable districts to build, create, link, and maintain their curriculum within an easy-to-use instructional framework;
- Provide teachers with a single instructional desktop and the ability to create customized lessons and activities based on individual student needs;
- Align instructional plans, content and assessment to state or local learning objectives and standards;
- Facilitate collaboration and feedback among all participants of the learning community, including peer review of lesson plans to determine best practices;
- Help administrators manage the communication and learning environments within their state, district, and individual schools;
- Provide secure access to all the district's Web-based applications for teachers, students, parents and administrators, including award-winning Riverdeep curricular content; and
- Encourage more parental involvement by keeping them informed of their children's progress, school and classroom activities.
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