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1EdTech GLC: JES & Co. Joins 1EdTech Consortium

JES & Co. Joins 1EdTech Consortium

Creator of Achievement Standards Network (ASN), a digitized, Semantic Web friendly collection of K-12 academic standards will work with 1EdTech on Curriculum Standards Project


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Lake Mary, Florida. April 28 2009JES & Co. announced today that they have joined 1EdTech Consortium as a Contributing Member to support development of interoperability standards for the K12/ Common Cartridge Curriculum Standards project.  This work will be part of the Common Cartridge v1.1 release, which will enable curriculum standards (e.g. learning objectives) to be contained with the learning materials of a Common Cartridge.  As a result, teachers will gain greater precision in identifying appropriate materials for their students and schools can more systematically track student progression. JES & Co. brings core expertise in ensuring that the curriculum standards are interoperable across learning platforms and between these and other systems.

Several leading K-12 educational publishers and learning platform providers have been very involved in the CCv1.1 release.  The inclusion of JES & Co. expertise and ASN will add a critical component to the work. For more information on K12/Schools Enhancements to Common Cartridge visit: /cck12.html.

 “We are pleased that we have such an experienced organization in the arena of state curriculum standards and metadata joining 1EdTech.” said Dr. Rob Abel, CEO of 1EdTech. “JES & Co. will be instrumental in helping the group move forward and we look forward to their participation.”

”1EdTech Consortium is the leader in addressing international standards for teaching and learning.  We are proud to be part of the organization and look forward to working closely with nations, publishers and education solution providers as they integrate learning objectives into their offerings,” added Diny Golder, the Executive Director of JES & Co.

The Curriculum Standards group is part of the K12/Schools Enhancements to Common Cartridge initiative that addresses several specific issues including incorporation of 1EdTech Question and Test Interoperability (QTI), alignment of content and assessments to curriculum standards and learning objectives, and lesson planning.

Through initial funding by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), JES & Co. developed an open, Semantic Web-enabled framework, referred to as the Achievement Standards Network (ASN), for standardized description and global distribution of achievement standards developed by nations, states, and organizations to support interoperable services and systems serving education.  Using its open framework, ASN has created and maintains an authoritative collection of academic standards in machine-readable form.  The ASN collection currently contains data for all fifty of the United States in addition to select national standards.  Through use of globally unique identifiers for the standards, content creators are able to describe the objective of learning and teaching resources they create in the terms required by each state that can be understood by machines and people globally.  The unique identifiers are used by machines and software applications to communicate with the ASN collection over the Web and to render the human readable text of the standards identified.

About JES & Co.

JES & Co. has occupied a unique niche in the educational landscape since its establishment in the early 1990’s.  JES & Co. has done extensive research into Semantic Web enabling of achievement standard data,  learning resource discovery by academic standard and distribution of interoperable achievement standards data.  In addition, JES & Co. through its efforts in co-founding The Partnership for 21st Century Skills brought together a vast array of participants from all facets of the educational enterprise. Companies such as AOL, Microsoft, SAP, Dell, Apple and Cisco put aside their business self-interest to work with COSN, NEA, USDOEd, SREB, SETDA, ISTE, AASL and others members of the public sector to develop a dialogue that would become the vision of what a 21st century education and workforce needs to be.

In 2006 JES & Co. partnered with SETDA, the State Education Technology Director’s Association, to develop a toolset that would combine the GEM cataloging tools with the ASN state standards descriptors. The SETDA tool kit also supports state and district educators, providing a place to share the best practices in the use of standards and suggestions on how to share learning resources state-to-state.

During the past 15 years, JES & Co. has developed and managed educational programs for Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Job Corp. and others. With proven success, JES & Co. continues to fulfill its mission of assisting companies and agencies in their efforts to improve education through philanthropic endeavors.  

In 2005, JES & Co. assumed the administration of the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM). GEM was formed in the mid-90s and was originally funded solely by the US Department of Education. With JES & Co.’s leadership, GEM was transformed into The Gateway to 21st Century Skills and boasts a consortium member base of over 700 organizations and universities with close to 50,000 21st century teaching and learning resources. Now sponsored by the National Education Association (NEA), the Gateway serves NEA’s 3.2 million teachers nationwide and remains free to all of its users. For more information on JES & Co. visit: http://www.jesandco.org


About 1EdTech Consortium (1EdTech GLC)
1EdTech Learning is a nonprofit member organization that strives to enable the growth and impact of learning technology in higher education, K-12, and corporate education worldwide. 1EdTech GLC members are leading corporations, higher education institutions, school districts and government organizations who are enabling the future of education by developing interoperability and adoption practice standards for educational and learning technology.  1EdTech GLC sponsors Learning Impact: a global program and conference that recognizes the impact of learning and educational technology on access, affordability, and quality – the world’s most significant educational challenges. For more information, visit .