ExploreLearning News

ExploreLearning Awarded SBIR Phase II Grant

We are pleased to announce that, as of late yesterday, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded ExploreLearning a SBIR Phase II grant. The "formal" title of the project is called "Modular Online Simulations for Math and Science with Integrated Assessment of Complex, Standards-Aligned Learning Objectives."

For a translation of this mouthful, I turned to ExploreLearning’s very own Paul Cholmsky who will serve as the grant’s Principal Investigator:

With this SBIR grant, we hope to revolutionize assessment in math and science the same way ExploreLearning Gizmos™ are revolutionizing instruction. The grant will help us to develop the next generation of Gizmos which will be able to "think" -- they'll be able to determine what a student knows or doesn't know, automatically tailor subsequent instruction to best meet the needs of the student at a given point in time, and then generate progress reports for students, parents, teachers and administrators.

Better yet, says Paul:

With today's ever increasing emphasis on measurability and accountability, this new product will also automatically customize itself for the applicable state curriculum standards in order to provide each student with a clear roadmap for succeeding on NCLB-mandated tests."

CONGRATULATIONS and a pat on our own backs for this super feat! Of course, now the hard work (or is it the fun?) begins. In either case, we’ll be rolling up our sleeves and putting our noses to the grindstone! After we celebrate, that is, with some gelato from Charlottesville’s newest downtown eatery.

Accessibility Info

At ExploreLearning, we take accessibility very seriously and, to that end, we've made every reasonable effort to make the ExploreLearning.com site accessible to all users.

We are pleased to announce, then, that we've just finished a redo of our HTML code such that the ExploreLearning site now has a Conformance Level "A" per the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines.

• Read more about ExploreLearning's Accessibility
• Read more about the WAI Guidelines

NECC in NOLA...a distant memory

ExploreLearning's founder Dave Shuster and I attended ISTE's annual NECC conference in New Orleans early last week. Despite the heat and humidity, we enjoyed seeing a great number of "ELFs" or ExploreLearning Friends and to make some new ELFs. We also got to meet up with Dick Casabonne, one of our Board members, who (it was evident) knew almost everyone attending the conference.

The exhibit hall at the mile-long Ernest N. Morial Convention Center was chock full of the "usual suspects" in educational software, hardware, etc. ExploreLearning Gizmos could be seen in the Apple booth and on SMART Technologies interactive whiteboards. Given that it was less than a year ago that we launched the "new and improved" ExploreLearning.com which offers subscription access to a library of 300+ of our award-winning Gizmos, several new ELFs gave us "two thumbs up."

Oh, and we did manage to enjoy some of NOLA's legendary cuisine, but (alas) not the night life. Dave scheduled too many breakfast meetings! And that's the report from your man on the street … now back to our regularly scheduled programming.