about us

The Corporation for Educational Technology was created in 1988 when The Buddy System Project began. This project's early goals were to provide home technology to 250 families in five school communities through a partnership of public and private institutions. The traditional Buddy (computer-at-home) project has served over 35,000 Hoosier families since the project’s inception. Buddy has provided programming, special project facilitation and training services to more than 12,000 educators from all 92 Indiana counties through its grants, professional development center, outreach training programs and conferences. Our award-winning website provides free teaching and learning resources to teachers, parents and students at http://www.buddyproject.org.

In 2000, Buddy renewed its mission to focus on research & development programs that drive student academic achievement gains, renaming the project, “Buddy²: the Next Generation.” Buddy still honors and recognizes schools and teachers who strive to implement teaching and learning programs that show visible evidence of our Buddy core values.

• Learning opportunities beyond classroom time and place;
• Technology as a tool to support learning goal achievement;
• Parent involvement in the education of their children;
• Equal access to technology resources for all students and teachers; and
• Reflective practice of teaching and learning for continuous improvement.

STAR Writers:

Over the past five years, our attention has been focused, predominantly, on improving writing instruction and assessment. After coordinating a three-year research and development project called STAR Writers in five elementary schools (2001-2004) we learned that student achievement in writing is attained by increasing attention to instruction and practice of writing skills.

We are now engaged in year two of a follow-up study among four schools (2004-2006) to hone writing assessment skills of teachers. Confidence of participating teachers in grades 2 through 8 in holistic assessment using the ISTEP+ rubrics has dramatically improved and interrater reliability between teachers and trained STAR scorers now exceeds 95%.

Teacher participants employ writing traits assessment and instructional strategies in their day-to-day teaching. Their “best practice” lesson plans will soon be shared with all Indiana educators through Buddy’s new online writing resource.

The Writing Site:

In an effort to extend the benefits of Buddy’s experiences in writing instruction and assessment to all Indiana educators, we launched a new Writing Site early in 2005. At the core of this site is an interactive tutorial for holistic assessment of student writing using the ISTEP+ rubrics. Currently, users can practice scoring authentic student writing samples in a variety of genres from grades 3 through 8. Immediately after submitting a score, the user is presented with a comparison of his/her score with an “expert’s” score, including a detailed rationale explaining the scorer’s thinking process while assigning the derived score. Six practice papers are available in each grade level and genre.

In addition, hundreds of writing exemplars are available for review, download, and printing for classroom instruction use. Supplementary content about writing instruction, strategies, resources and research is being developed to add value to this site as the “go to” for educators looking for information about writing.

In the fall of 2005 we launched Phase II of the site’s development to expand the assessment tutorials to grades K through 12 as well as to provide additional exemplars for writing across all content areas.

To date, more than 150 Indiana classroom teachers have pledged to share classroom sets of writing samples this year to fuel this development.