Mary Burns brings more than 20 years of experience in teaching, curriculum development, teacher professional development, Website and database design, qualitative research and evaluation, and instructional design—primarily in educational technology.

Her domestic work at EDC includes online instruction, evaluation of online programs and digital content, school-based coaching, and research on virtual schools. Internationally she has worked on EDC projects in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East focused on facility design, creating online content, teacher training, evaluations, developing teacher training curriculum, and technology planning and program design.

In Indonesia, Burns created EDC’s technology-based professional development package Developing Active Learning with ICTs. She designed EDC’s one-computer classroom program and school-based coaching program, a five-month hybrid program that prepared Indonesian educators to work as classroom technology coaches.

Burns is author of Distance Education for Teacher Training: Modes, Models and Methods and coauthor of Technology as a Catalyst for School Communities; Connecting Student Learning and Technology; Using Technology to Train Teachers: Appropriate Uses of ICTs in Developing Countries and, most recently, the chapter “'The Wisdom of Practice': Web 2.0 as a Cognitive and Community-Building Tool.” She has written for Educational Leadership, Kappan, The Journal of Staff Development, numerous research reports, policy documents, and case studies for USAID and the World Bank.

Before EDC, Burns taught French, Latin, Language Arts, and writing at secondary schools and universities in Jamaica, the United States, and Mexico. As a teacher she received two Fulbrights for teaching excellence that allowed summer study in Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan and a teaching award from her students. For five years, she was a low-income-housing researcher and community development specialist along the Texas-Mexico border and in favelas in Brazil. At SEDL, she was the lead curriculum developer of a training program that received the National Staff Development Council’s 2001 award for technology excellence in teacher professional development.

Burns received her BA in international relations and Romance languages from Boston College, an EdM in teaching and curriculum from Harvard University, and an MA in Latin American studies and an MS in community and regional planning from the University of Texas.