Welcome to the 2010-11 school year. Hard to believe it's already a month old. JFYNet has some new options this year, in addition to our traditional programs.

We are continuing with our established MCAS Express, JFYNet Plus and Target and Teach. We're glad to see more districts adopting Target and Teach, our Galileo-based formative assessment and differentiated instruction program.  It has always made sense to use a real time formative assessment regimen to monitor and adjust instruction, but actually doing it is somewhat more complicated than just describing its virtues. With Target and Teach, JFYNet makes it easy. We'd be glad to demonstrate it for you.

Our science and math curricula for middle and high school continue to expand as we add new resources to the JFYNet moodle page. The most recent addition is the MIT STAR online teaching tools in genetics and biochemistry from the MIT Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT). We have developed a relationship with OEIT that will bring the latest science and technology instructional innovations from MIT right into JFYNet classrooms. We will also be taking groups of teachers and students to MIT to meet with the people who are developing the next generation of e-learning tools. To say it's exciting is an understatement. 

Race to the Top has put the new Common Core standards on the agenda. We will be aligning JFYNet curricula to these new standards. With all the resources we have to draw on, we will be able to respond robustly to these new demands. We're  looking forward to working with you on all aspects of RTT.

Finally, there's our new ACCUPLACER prep course. The College Board has designated JFYNetWorks as an official ACCUPLACER institution. This gives us the capability to administer ACCUPLACER diagnostics and placements. With these official College Board assessment tools, we can design individualized developmental curricula as we have done with MCAS. There is no longer any reason why your graduates have to face ACCUPLACER unprepared. We can deliver the whole assessment-instruction-reassessment suite in your classrooms.  

We are pursuing many grants in collaboration with our districts. Recent successes include a Title IID grant with Revere and a big regional grant that we can't disclose yet. We have corporate grants in the works for Fitchburg and Spencer-East Brookfield. We'd like to broaden the collaborative fund-raising effort to more districts. Please contact us if you would like to partner in a fundraising effort.

We're collecting 2010 MCAS data from all our schools now. As soon as we get the data, we will run our analyses, as we do every year. We  look forward to another set of great statistics.

We're excited to meet the new challenges of 2010-11. We look forward to working with you.