by Jeff Branzburg

Featured in EdWeek's recent article on the NYC Innovation Zone, as well as on the local news channel NY1, East Bronx Academy for the Future is a 6th - 12th grade school located just south of the Bronx Zoo.  Teaching Matters, the lead and founding community partner of this New Century School, has worked collaboratively with Sarah Scrogin, the founding school leader, to push the envelope on ways to use technology to enable learning innovation.  Now, buoyed by an entirely new level of central support from the NYC Department of Education's Innovation Zone, EBA's focus is to pioneer new models that transform what schools look like, personalizing instruction to the needs of each individual student, and dramatically improving student achievement.  Teaching Matters will be hosting an Innovation Field Trip to East Bronx Academy on Tuesday, April 12 for school leaders and educators looking to spark their own thinking and see these practices in action.  

A few examples of the types of initiatives that will be observable include:

• A partnership with the NYC iSchool in Manhattan allowing 4 EBA teachers to teach high school courses to mixed groups of EBA and iSchool students, using video conferencing through Skype as a way to communicate across boroughs. The calculus teacher, for example, meets with 3 EBA students and Skypes with 3 iSchool students, sometimes all together, sometimes separately.
• An Honors English taught through a blended model. All students are getting in-class and homework assignments electronically, and submitting all work using Google Docs. Resources posted on the teacher's website are available for study and review 24/7. Even testing is being done electronically, with the teacher using network monitoring software to turn off Internet access when needed during exams. The class is entirely paperless and is custom developed by the teacher.
• Advanced Placement and credit recovery courses, blending online work with teacher-led, are being held in a number of subjects.
• A collaboration with three schools in Kansas on a social studies project co-developed by social studies teachers  around a "Just War" project (asking the question when is war justified?) 
• School - home connection enhanced through email addresses for all parents using the school's Google Apps domain.

If you are a NYC educator sign up and join us for an Innovation Field Trip on Tuesday, April 12.