Ideas brain
ILAET nick ILAET slogan

ILAET approach is multidisciplinary
learning projects based on collective data collection and cooperative analysis. The goal is for students to take an active stance on data by independently discovering the mechanisms of processes in the world around them, whether in biology, sociology, cultural studies, international relations, climate change, ecology, history, or political science.

[ Letter from the President ]
From
the Real Data
to the Real
Knowledge

Dr. Boris Berenfeld,
ILAET Founder and President:

Modern reality makes people to face complex tasks not divided into academic disciplines, but present multidisciplinary challenges involving information retrieval, critical analysis, model building, and forecasting. Contemporary education has to be flexible and follow the changing demands of modern life, be same multifaceted and complex. And this transforms education into an integrated practice with no room for dogmatism, once and for all established methods and immutable postulates.

Our approach is multidisciplinary learning projects based on collective data collection and cooperative analysis. The goal is for students to take an active stance on data by independently discovering the mechanisms of processes in the world around them, whether in biology, sociology, cultural studies, international relations, climate change, ecology, history, or political science.
Students collect information in a distributed database, guided by their own hypothesis and / or generally accepted (in order to verify it), and using mathematical tools they build models, verify them, and in result – prove or refute that hypothesis or model.

We believe that involving students not only in the solution, but also in the formulation of a learning problem, as well as the joint search for solutions is the key to creating a modern personality, ready for challenges and active participation in building a democratic society.

[ Services ]
Integration of Future Pedagogy,
Curricula, Technologies and
Teacher Training:

CUSTOMIZED SOLUTIONS

ILAET can develop solutions tailored to your needs and budgets. These can include:

Curriculum development – Create courses for your objectives and circumstances, ensuring learning is relevant and appropriate for your students. Update existing curricula or introduce students to emerging fields like the life sciences, nanotechnology, engineering, or robotics.

Procurement – Develop strategies and schedules for procuring school solutions to increase efficiencies and contain costs.

Content training – Provide professional development in fields like science and math to bring non-certified teachers up to standards.

Consulting - We can help you set regional or national education standards, based on best practices and research, and help your schools to meet them.

TECHNOLOGY & CURRICULUM

There is too often a faith that merely installing computers in schools will somehow improve learning. This is not the case.
Computers and other technologies must be carefully aligned with curricula and pedagogical objectives to be effective learning tools.  ILAET will make su re your technologies support teaching, not the other away around. We can help you to ensure your technologies support your learning goals, train faculty to integrate technologies into classroom practice, and prepare teachers to assess the skills and competencies that students gain when using technologies.

BEST PRACTICES

ILAET continually works with leading educators, curriculum developers, technology specialists, researchers, master teachers, and school administrators worldwide to identify and confirm the best classroom practices.

We also work with some of the world’s finest schools to pilot and test new innovations in curricula, hardware, software, and teaching strategies. Leveraging this expertise, we can help your educators, developers, administrators, and master teachers to adapt advanced strategies and solutions into your educational framework.

We deliver best practices that optimize learning for your specific needs, goals, and circumstances. We also can arrange for you to visit schools to see master teachers at work using today’s learning innovations in their classrooms.

SPECIAL EDUCATION & REMEDIATION

ILAET can meet your special education and remediation needs. We can develop learning initiatives for exceptionally talented students, ensuring they are challenged and reach their fullest potential. We can provide strategies for identifying and recruiting gifted children throughout a region or nation to produce the next generation of scientists and professionals.

We can deliver remediation programs for unmotivated students that are tailored to each child’s needs. Moreover, we offer programs for disabled children that use technologies and strategies like multimedia e-learning to end their isolation and ensure they obtain rewarding educations. ILAET can help all students realize their intellectual capabilities.

TEACHER TRAINING

ILAET works with leading educators and master teachers to train your faculty in the most modern learning methods and tools.

Technologies – We can prepare teachers in new learning technologies and ensure they can integrate these resources into daily practice to make learning deeper and more productive.

Pedagogy – We can prepare teachers in new pedagogical strategies like hands-on inquiry and enable them to assess students when using advanced teaching methods, ensuring they measure the learning of both content and skills.

ILAET offers both face-to-face training and asynchronous e-learning, either over summer breaks or during the school year. Moreover, we can tailor web-based professional development to provide teachers with just-in-time support in both content and practices before they teach the next day’s class.

PLANNING YOUR TECHNOLOGY

ILAET can optimize your technology budgets by aligning the most effective solutions with your pedagogical goals and needs. We can help you to develop an overarching technology strategy so you can set budgets and avoid the inefficiencies of procuring products on an ad hoc, item-by-item basis.

With careful planning, you can affordably deploy proven technologies in your classrooms and enhance the teaching of science, math, the humanities, and arts.

[ Case study ]
Red dot logo
Red coat

COLLECTIVE
REMEMBRANCE
MAP


We believe that it is our responsibility to Holocaust victims to help schools worldwide to elevate history education from textbook-centered and often dogmatic to authentic investigations that build critical-thinking skills, cooperation, and objectivity. We strive for education that not only open children’s minds but their hearts as well, enabling them to reason and act as historians.

We believe that by studying the Holocaust, students can develop a keen awareness of human rights and dignity. They will come to appreciate the worth of democratic values and recognize the dangers that arise when these values are abandoned.

We believe that as educators, it is not enough to teach the events of the Holocaust; we must instill in students civic responsibility, particularly for those in newly-minted democracies like Ukraine. Students must be able to draw ethical and moral lessons from the Holocaust, and of the cost of turning a blind eye to intolerance and injustice. They must be able to apply these lessons to the world in which they live and understand their responsibilities as future citizens and decision makers.

Link to Babiy Yar Memorial website: BABYNYAR

[ Case study ]

Global Lab
largest European
learning
community

Globallab globe

DISTRIBUTED
KNOWLEDGE
NETWORK


GlobalLab is a unique, web-based, educational platform that enables students, teachers, and learners of all ages to pose questions and together find answers. With GlobalLab, teachers finally have in one place all the resources, tools, partners, and support to bring authentic investigations to classrooms and homes. In GlobalLab, everyone is both a learner and a knowledge creator.

With the arrival of Web 2.0 and the proliferation of social networking, clouds, mobile applications, crowdsourcing, and citizen scientists, GlobalLab evolved to leverage these trends in educational settings. Dedicated to adapting the best technologies and pedagogy for learning, GlobalLab is now expanding worldwide with assistance from the Skolkovo Innovation Foundation and VEB Innovation Fund, an award from Microsoft, and in cooperation with UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education.

Link to GlobalLab website: GLOBALLAB

[ Case study ]
School
2030

HANDS-ON
LEARNING
EVERYWHERE


School 2030 is a unique, web-based, educational platform that enables students, teachers, and learners of all ages to pose questions and together find answers. With School 2030, teachers finally have in one place all the resources, tools, partners, and support to bring authentic investigations to classrooms and homes. In School 2030 is akin to San Francisco Exploratorium or the Explore-At-Bristol Science Discovery Centre in Bristol, England, where children explore complex ideas by playing with hands-on exhibits. Its design was facilitated by the Moscow Institute of Open Education in collaboration with ILAET.

With 20,000 square meters for 1,100 K-12 students, it is Europe’s most spacious school. And it is the most advanced. Unlike many schools, technologies are not tacked onto the curriculum; they are integral to teaching and learning. In addition to data loggers in science classrooms, all students have wireless laptop computers that they take home. The devices are loaded with learning software ranging from text editors to interactive dynamic molecular simulations.

At School 2030, educators make sure that students explore the world around them not just with computers but with their hands as well. The school seeks to build healthy, well-rounded individuals knowledgeable in all key content and empowered with the intellectual tools needed to prosper in a rapidly changing world. For schoolchildren, each building is equipped with classrooms and laboratory rooms, gyms, computer labs, premises for additional education. Sports stadiums are located in the school grounds. The school has a health and fitness center with swimming pools, large and small gyms, gymnastics and gyms. The classrooms use interactive whiteboards and projectors, laptop computers and MacBooks.



School 2030 website: School2030

[ Case study ]
Nano
School

Nano School transforms a school of the future into a graduate high school for nanotechnology and molecular science. It delivers the curricula, technologies and teacher training to make nanoscience a coherent curricular focus throughout high school. Students will graduate with an advanced understanding of nanoscience at the foundation of their education, preparing them to pursue the field professionally. Students gain molecular literacy by hands-on modeling and experimentation. From fullerenes and carbon nanotubes to nanoparticles and nanowires, they design nano-devices on computer screens and explore their behaviors and properties. They understand the links between what these devices can do and their underlying molecular and atomic interactions. Students investigate, for example, why carbon nanotubes (see image) are stronger than steel, but much lighter.

Nano School provides the support science teachers need to deliver multidisciplinary curriculum, concept integration, innovative modeling techniques, and hands-on projects in nanotechnology. Working in teams, teachers use interdisciplinary modules, helping students to build upon concepts from one science domain to another as they advance in their education. Cutting-edge frontier science usually does not reach secondary education for many decades. In 1989, the image on the left heralded the dawn of modern nanotechnology for the public. Scientists used an atomic force microscope to position 35 xenon atoms to spell their corporation’s name. Only twenty years later, nanoschool offers a comprehensive curriculum centered around the revolution in nanotechnology and its promise, thus accelerating the pace by which advanced knowledge is taught in classrooms.

[ Case study ]

LearningGrounds™

LearningGrounds brochure

ENHANCE
EDUCATION
WITH INNOVATIVE
LEARNING
CENTERS


Deliver advanced 21st century learning without building new schools. Provide a safe place where children can nurture their talents, interests, knowledge, and skills. Challenge gifted learners with science, math, technology, engineering, and the arts. With LearningGrounds™, communities can elevate the quality of education easily and effectively.

LearningGrounds™ are innovative learning environments for after-school, weekend, and summer programs. Featuring state-of-the-art technologies and learning strategies, each offers opportunities to grow and excel that exceed most K-12 schools.

LearningGrounds™ are integrated systems of walls, spaces, lighting, colors, technologies, and staff that nurture creativity, stimulate curiosity, and foster a love of learning. Students study with hands-on projects that mirror how children learn and professionals work.

A LearningGrounds™ can be constructed from the ground up or an existing facility that has been repurposed.

ILAET offers LearningGrounds™ as complete solutions – from planning and design to curricula and staff training.



Download brochure print version [PDF]

Download brochure preview version [PDF]

Partners

ILAET partners
with leading companies and institutions to provide the most effective solutions and services. From original equipment manufacturers and software and hardware developers to research and development firms, universities, and some of the best schools and teachers worldwide, our partners are preeminent in the fields of education, science, technologies, and sustainable development.

ILAET partners

Publications

ILAET publication 1

Teaching and Learning in the Information Age:A Guide to Educational Telecommunications

Highlights the potential of educational telecommunications for curricular enhancement and professional development. Chapters on rationale for computer-mediated communication in the classroom, communities of practice, classroom implementation, and professional development follow a similar format, with outlines, overviews, teachers' stories, summaries, WWW search terms and pages to explore, discussion questions, and suggestions for using telecommunications projects in the classroom. Includes a glossary. For preservice and inservice teachers. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

AMAZON:
B.Berenfeld "Teaching and Learning in the Information Age"

ILAET publication 2

Beyond the Textbook Approach: Building the Classroom of Tomorrow

Using science and mathematics to capture the imagination of young minds, Boris Berenfeld, president and CEO of International Laboratory of Advanced Education Technologies, is a champion of schools around the world wanting to craft a new approach to learning that combines new technologies and bold curricula to bring these topics to life. Berenfeld’s London-based consultancy and technology provider seeks to reinvent teaching and learning in emerging felds like life sciences, nanotechnology, engineering and robotics. A Russian-born educator, technologist and biophysicist, Berenfeld spoke to Arabic Knowledge@Wharton about his leading-edge work to develop new ways of classroom learning and the magical ideas that inspire them.

DOWNLOAD:
B.Berenfeld "Beyond the Textbook Approach" [PDF]

ILAET publication 1

When Everyone is a Mobile Historian, Everyone is a Lifelong Learner

Collaborative, data-driven, technology-based inquiry has proven to be a superior learning strategy over traditional textbooks memorization and pre-canned labs. However, the constructivist, project-based inquiry approach has been mostly province of the physical sciences. The Red Dot Memories Project is the pioneering initiative to apply constructivist pedagogy to the learning of history. Developed by the non-profit Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in the Ukraine, in collaboration with ILAET, the project explored the use of mobile technologies in learning and teaching about the atrocities of the World War II in Ukraine and Easter Europe that are collectively known as the Holocaust by Bullets.

DOWNLOAD:
B.Berenfeld "When Everyone is a Mobile Historian" [PDF]