9615425 Rankin The SOUNDPRINT Media Center, Inc. (SMCI) proposes the production and distribution of The Education Connection (w.t.), a news service that will focus media attention on model efforts that use networked technologies to reform the teaching of science, mathematics, engineering and technology in K-12 education. The Education Connection project is designed to increase both the volume and the quality of reporting on science and math educational reforms. Through this reporting, The Education Connection will bring valuable information to those who can act upon it: teachers, administrators, and parents of school age children. SMCI will work with an expert advisory board that includes practicing teachers, educational researchers and experts to identify successful uses of technology in the science and math classroom. The Education Connection will provide news directors, radio talk show hosts, public and commercial radio and television broadcasters, and science and technology reporters in all media with monthly tip sheets that present in-depth profiles of how and why technology-based reforms were implemented, and their results to a broad national audience. Twelve major technology-based reform projects will be featured in major articles, while others will be profiled in shorter pieces and sidebars. The Education Connection will have a radio broadcast component that features model science and technology educational reform programs in a series of 24 short format modules created to fit within existing broadcast vehicles, and as a stand-alone series. A full length half-hour audio documentary will be distributed for broadcast during April 1997, for National Science and Technology Week. And an online multimedia resource will provide listener-users with background information, information, including plans, photos and graphics illustrating the reform project, and other materials that demonstrate to the user how change was effected. The Education Connection will target an audience that in cludes parents of K-12 students, educators and administrators, as well as the general public through distribution on public and commercial radio stations nationwide, on television and in print publications. Online distribution will reach a national and international audience with model projects, maximizing the impact of The Education Connection. ***
