Abstract:

The Educative System in Mexico is in the process of changing the basic education national curriculum. It’s remodeling from the 1st to the 12th grade curriculum into a competency develop approach. Training and support to improve teaching skills for teachers is one of the most important actions that are being carried out in order to accomplish this change.

Science at your School is an in-service teachers’ training program coordinated by the Mexican Academy of Sciences with the support of the Ministry of Education and the National Council for Sciences and Technology. Participants are trained in Mathematics, Development of communicative skills and Natural Sciences, during a full year.

The mission and purpose of this program is: to bring together scientists and teachers in order to develop alternative methods to those of traditional teaching, to change teachers attitude towards mathematics and science and to stimulate children and young people interest on science through greater interaction with experimental practice.

Since 2002, Science at your School has trained over 6,000 in service- teachers in México. From 2005 on, the program is working In México’s rural areas with community instructors In 2007 the program signed a cooperation agreement with 7 academies of sciences of Latin American countries to help them establish a similar program in their countries. For the moment the program is working with teachers of Guatemala, Dominican Republic and Panama.

Guided by the purpose of scaling up the number of teachers instructed in the program we are offering “Science at your school” as a distance program on line. We started the pilot program in September 2009 with 400 teachers from almost all the states in Mexico.

In this talk we will present the curricular structure of the new distance teacher training program, the set up process, the learning process and the improvement proposal resulting from the evaluation process established.

Keywords:

On-line program, sciences, trainig teachers.