Missouri Southern has announced that the education department has received a one-year grant to the SimpleK12 Teacher Learning Community.

The grant period will began Sept. 1, 2012, and will expire Aug. 31, 2013.

“It is our hope that all of your faculty members, undergraduate education students and your alumni from the education college will become members, and actively use the resources we provide,” Tom Dalton of SimpleK said.

SimpleK12 is an E-learning company located in Orlando, Fla. The Teacher Learning Community is an online resource that provides professional development training for faculty and school administrators all over the world.

“This is a great opportunity,” Dr. Al R. Cade, Interim Dean of School of Education, said.

“We always want to be deeper and wider when expanding our knowledge base. We want to do the very best job preparing teachers for this area.”

The School of Education at Southern is comprised of three departments: Teacher Education, Kinesiology and Psychology.

Students, faculty and alumni from all three areas will benefit from the grant and be able to access online learning tools to further their professional education using the Teaching Learning Community.

SimpleK12 has developed a special Southern member enrollment web page, allowing members to easily enroll and access resources in the Teacher Learning Community.

Normally, individual subscribers pay $300 annually. This grant awards around $10,000 to cover the departmental use of the website.

The online portal contains over 500 hours of self-paced training on technology, over 300 recorded webinars on technology subjects for teachers and access to hundreds of global teachers to collaborate with and share teaching resources.

The topics range from improving teaching and learning in the classroom, iPad use, top 10 tech skills all teachers should have and teaching NASA in a non-science course.