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William & Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation

Professional Development

We collaboratively research, develop and implement evidence-based, customized professional development programs for pre-service and in-service K-12 educators and educational leaders.

free online professional learning for educators

See all online professional learning courses for educators
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Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) for Educators

The Social and Emotional Learning modules are a set of on-demand, self-paced online learning opportunities that can be taken in any order. They are grounded in the CASEL Framework for Social and Emotional Learning and provide information, resources, strategies and engagement opportunities related to SEL competencies.

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Learning Differences

The Learning Differences course focuses on executive functions such as attention, memory, task prioritization, organization and planning, helping teachers and students understand how strengths and struggles in any of these areas manifest in classroom learning and what strategies support all functions of the brain.

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Amplifying Statistics

Amplifying Statistics and Data Science in Classrooms is a set of modules that help educators develop strategies for using an investigation cycle to teach statistics and data science, ignite students’ interest in real world data investigations with technology and emphasize inferential reasoning through posing different types of investigative questions.

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InSTEP: Invigorating Statistics Teacher Education Through Professional Online Learning

InSTEP is an innovative personalized online learning platform that allows teachers to develop their expertise in teaching statistics and data science.

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AI with the FI: From Awareness to Advocacy

To address AI integration in classes, schools and districts and support the development of educators’ AI fluency to effectively equip students for an AI-driven future, we developed our AI with the FI: From Awareness to Advocacy webinar series. We adapted the series into a course format which can be completed for professional development hours.

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AI with the FI: From Insight to Innovation in Higher Education

Join the William & Ida Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, with support from the NC State College of Education, Office of Instructional Programs and NC State Data Science Academy, for an insightful webinar series exploring the evolving role of AI in driving innovation and transformation across higher education.

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The AI-Empowered Teacher

This course centers on AI literacy to help educators understand, evaluate, and use AI in their professional practice. AI-literate educators are equipped to protect student data, uphold ethical standards, and ensure that any use of technology supports equity, learning, and professional integrity.

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In-person opportunities

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LASER Institute

The Learning Analytics in STEM Education Research (LASER) Institute is a professional development program for early and mid-career researchers to leverage new data sources and apply computational methods (e.g., network analysis, text mining and machine learning) to support their existing research and develop new lines of inquiry.

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Computer Science Training

The Friday Institute partners with educational leaders and policy makers from the school to national level. We build educator capacity to create opportunities for ALL in North Carolina to explore computer science.

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projects and programs

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Real Issues, Real Data

This series is designed for K-12 educators, researchers and policymakers to explore pivotal topics in education.

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Code.org Regional Partnership

The Friday Institute worked together with Code.org to build and adapt the summer week-long Computer Science Principles and Computer Science A training to an asynchronous model. We produced the professional development materials and prepared the PLACE, our online platform, to help regional partners bring these trainings to educators across the United States.

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Oak Foundation Micro-credentials

The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation and PLLC Team has designed and facilitated a range of online professional development experiences that focus on learning differences, social and emotional learning (SEL) and learner agency in partnership with the Oak Foundation. In support of this work, the PLLC has also developed a SEL guide for administrators and added a new stack of learner agency micro-credentials to provide an elevated personalized experience where educators can construct their own pathways and have the opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned.

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