Probability Park A Database-backed On-line Professional Development Environment Targeting Standards-based School Reform

The State of Oregon is undergoing massive standards-based school reform. This has created immediate and wide spread professional development demands. We have piloted an online professional development environment that targets probability and statistics standards and is designed to meet these demands in a scalable and cost effective fashion. The environment is called probability park and consists of four parts: a communication center, a set of learning modules for teaching content, a resource room of classroom activities, and a verification institute that takes teachers through the process of judging collections of student work against criterion-referenced standards. This paper describes the structure of probability park both pedagogically and technologically. We show how we used specific technologies to achieve desired pedagogic ends.