The Concord Consortium is a non-profit research and development organization focused on designing and using innovative technology to improve science, math, and engineering education. The organization makes available numerous STEM activities that meet the Next Generation Science Standards. Activities provided by the Concord Consortium are based on real world phenomena, so activities assigned by teachers can help students learn complex concepts in an engaging way.
The Concord Consortium can be used by teachers to align tasks and activities to their curricular priorities and standards. This tool supports teachers with many conceptual models and simulations which represent phenomena to be learned by students. When students are exposed to these experiential learning models, they are compelled to ask questions and critically think about the changes they observe in models when they take certain actions. The exploration of these models and simulations help students successfully investigate concepts they are curious about. Additionally, teachers can alter some activities to suit the objectives they want to get across to their students.
Teachers can track students’ progress while they manipulate the models. The immediate feedback, games, and the ability to create prototypes get students excited and engaged in the activities assigned to them by teachers, making learning more fun. When students answer questions on the website, teachers can view students’ progress because Concord Consortium allows teachers to create classes, add/remove students, create assignments, and view students’ reports. Information on students’ progress can influence teachers’ decisions for subsequent interventions.
Students can work on teamwork activities provided on the Concord Consortium website. There is a chat feature available which allows students to type and communicate with other students until activities are completed. The questions posed to students during and after participation in activities on the Concord Consortium website are in open-ended, multiple choice, and other question formats. Teachers can use these questions to assess students’ in-depth knowledge on different concepts.
The Concord Consortium follows the W3C criteria for accessibility conformance, known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and they focus on three main accessibility features:
Additionally, text-to-speech, word prediction, and optical character recognition are incorporated into the activities made available on the organization’ website and mobile apps. The activities and resources provided by the Concord Consortium are free to teachers and students. All teachers need to do to access these resources is to register and create a teacher account. Teachers can use their Schoology or Google accounts to register, or use their names and created passwords to complete registration forms. Information entered by teachers and students is kept secure, private, and confidential because Concord Consortium does not share such information with third parties. Except for some resources which need proper licensing information, all resources and activities can be used and shared freely, as long as teachers attribute these resources to “The Concord Consortium.”