Educator Professional Development Opportunities

HudsonAlpha educational outreach is dedicated to providing high quality professional development to educators across Alabama. We encourage educators to hold conversations and discussions about genetics, genomics and biotechnology with their students. Through our professional development opportunities, we provide educators with tools necessary to cover the content foundation for these conversations as well as engaging storylines and modern examples appropriate for high school classrooms. HudsonAlpha engages educators in professional development through two venues.

The GREAT Workshop will update genetics knowledge by highlighting recent scientific findings. In two full days of small group concurrent sessions and talks by leading researchers, teachers will be introduced to applications based on these discoveries that relate to health, agriculture and the environment. More information on the upcoming GREAT Workshops can be found here.

HudsonAlpha will continue the summer teacher academy for high school biology teachers from across Alabama during the summer of 2013. The Genetic Technologies for Alabama Classrooms (GTAC) will update the genetic content knowledge of educators, help secondary school educators describe and identify common student misconceptions in genetics, genomics and biotechnology and identify approaches to overcome them; craft, compile and distribute a tool kit of genetic related materials; promote the use of hands-on genetic activities. More information about GTAC for the summer 2013 can be found here.  

Annually, educational outreach writes and publishes the Biotechnology Discoveries and Applications Guidebook for high school educators. This publication describes a wide range of modern technologies and discoveries in the field of biotechnology in an easily understood format. Additionally, each article within the publication is linked directly to the appropriate Alabama Course of Study objectives which relate to the information. This allows an educator to quickly identify appropriate portions of his or her course where the information provided can be discussed. The 2009 Guidebook addresses 22 different topics and connects to the Alabama Courses of Study for 16 different courses. You can read more about Biotechnology Discoveries and Applications and obtain a pdf copy here.