Meet Featured Teacher Sarah Lorntson!

Name: Sarah Lorntson
Role: High School English Teacher
School: Mahtomedi High School
City, State: Mahtomedi, MN
Number of years teaching: 11
Twitter: @slorntson

How I use Curriki: Curriki is my go-to resource when I have new material to teach or want to try something different with my curriculum. I can find premade, high-quality lessons and activities that I can use right away or tailor to my students’ needs. I also love sharing my resources because I am sympathetic to the needs of new teachers (or experienced teachers with new challenges). It’s a way for me to give back to help other educators in the same way that other people have helped me to become more successful in my own classroom.

Here are some of my favorite Curriki resources:
* Avoiding Plagiarism by Christine Mytko
* American Literature an entire course by Emily Boyle
* Research Paper Assignment by Rachel Wiener

Here are some resources that I’ve contributed to Curriki:
* English 10 (entire course)
* Socratic Seminars
* Political TV Advertisement Project
* Jane Eyre Unit

Curriki Seeks Talented Software Engineering Students for Paid Summer Internship

By Joshua Marks, Curriki CTO

Would you like to be able to take a Curriki resource collection and make an e-book out of it so you can read it on a tablet at the beach and give to your students to take home?

Do you know of a talented software engineering student (or happen to be one) looking for something interesting and rewarding to do over the summer?

Curriki and its technology partner XWiki are participating in the annual Google Summer of Code program.

“The Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We work with many open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 6,000 successful student participants and over 3,000 mentors from over 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code.”

Here are the details on the specific project for which we would like to find a great student to mentor:

ePub Publisher

• The tool proposed here is to provide a shell to publish ePub archives that work on mobile devices. The objective is to export assemblies of pages within an ePub book that can be enjoyed offline on devices following identified profiles.
• In particular, the XWiki Collaborative Learning Assets Management System, an OER sharing platform in use by several projects, supports the assembly of learning resources of diverse origins and types by a concept of collections which encourages re-usability. This project should enhance this re-usability by an export feature that allows the content of a collection to be exported as e-book.
  • The software should support the author in predicting and verifying the playability of the content on various devices (e.g. warning that a Flash file is not going to work on the profile Aldiko on Android). It should also leverage open-source software such as Swify, ImageMagick, or FFmpeg to ensure an embedding that is reasonable in size and that works. An environment for prototyping the delivered ePub is central to this work.
  • The Curriki and Sankoré teams, together with the trainee, will support this choice in suggesting environments in wide use in their target population where this can be tested in the timeframe of the project (schools in the U.S., India, France, and French-speaking Africa).
  • A very successful contribution would include code that we can deploy to any XCLAMS installation. It should, with a small amount of changes, allow developers to also export to other package formats such as SCORM or Common Cartridge.
  • Mentors: the XCLAMS community and Curriki team, among others Paul Libbrecht and Joshua Marks (confirmed), as well as Ludovic Dubost and Flavius Olaru.
  • Delivery: open-source code (LGPL) using Groovy, Velocity, UNIX command-line-tools, that can be made part of the XCLAMS core code.

If you know a suitable candidate, please review the XWIki project site here http://gsoc.xwiki.org

Then sign up as a student with Google and List the XWiki ePub proposal, or your project of choice with Google here: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2013/xwiki

Thanks for your interest and we look forward to your contributions!

Adapting Classroom Resources to Meet the Needs of ALL Students

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

Did you know that autism affects 1 in 88 children (1 in 54 boys)   and that it is the fastest-growing serious developmental disability in the U.S?

April is autism awareness month. Be familiar with the early signs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in order to seek out early intervention programs.

At Curriki, we offer many resources in all subject areas that you can adapt and customize to meet the needs of ASD students. Our intent is to enable true personalized learning for all students, since everyone learns differently.

“I teach special needs children at Bowling Green Elementary School,” said Linda Olson.  “I found that I could research on the Curriki site and be able to find the exact worksheet or resource that a child in my class would need.  When your children are as diverse as mine, it is timesaving and beneficial to look to your site first.  This year I will be starting the first Elementary Autism Class for our district.  The range of needs for each child will be different on many levels, but I know that Curriki will help me meet those needs. Thank you for this site.”

Here are a few helpful resources:

• Autism Resources for Teachers from NEA
• Technology Central: tools & resources for the autism community from AutismSpeaks.org
• The Autism Speaks 100 Day Kit for newly diagnosed families
• Supporting Students With Autism: 10 Ideas for Inclusive Classrooms from Child-Autism-Parent-Café.com
• Ban Soon-taek Speaks at United Nations for World Autism Awareness Day video

Please share this post with a friend or colleague!

Benefits of Project Based Learning

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

How do you engage today’s Digital Age students in relevant, authentic learning tasks?

Project Based Learning (PBL) teaches both doing, as well as learning, and gives students real-world opportunities to think analytically, formulate ideas, and solve complex problems.

Project-based learning (PBL) has a long history in American education, dating to John Dewey and other early advocates.

Today, the project approach is center-stage as a strategy to engage diverse learners in rigorous learning.  Students are assessed based on what they produce or demonstrate rather than what they can recall for a test. This application of learning is a higher need as districts transition to the Common Core State Standards.

With PBL, not only do students acquire the knowledge outlined in the content standards, they also become proficient in essential skills for success in today’s world — such as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration. Teaching strategies that involve project-based learning offer students the potential of gaining deep insights into core concepts. For example, mathematics projects prompt students to develop and answer their own questions. This strategy assists students in developing higher order math skills that allow them to make the all-important connections between one math concept and other math concepts.

If you’re not familiar with our Project Based Learning Curriki Algebra 1 course, please consider using it as a classroom supplement, as the foundation for students’ Algebra 1 curriculum, in an after-school program, or in a homeschool environment.  (This course was sponsored by AT&T and developed by Curriki.)

Please share your experience with PBL, we’d love to hear from you!

5 Helpful Apps for Writers

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

If you fancy yourself a writer (or an aspiring writer), you’re probably already using the dozens of free apps available, from FreeSaurus to A Novel Idea. We did a bit more searching and found five unique apps that can be used for writing. You can find the collection here.

Handwriting Mail Free HD allows you to “handwrite” on your iPad. Per one user, “I use it for notes and journal entry because i find it easier to write than type. I just export the page as a pic and import that into my journal app with no loss of quality that i can tell.”

EasyBib helps you create bibliographies for your papers. Take a look at the video.
Evernote ensures that whatever you write is available on all of your devices. Here’s their description: “Evernote is an easy-to-use, free app that helps you remember everything across all of the devices you use. Stay organized, save your ideas and improve productivity. Evernote lets you take notes, capture photos, create to-do lists, record voice reminders–and makes these notes completely searchable, whether you are at home, at work, or on the go.”
DropMind Lite helps you pre-write by creating mind maps. Here’s their description: “DropMind® is a mind mapping application for iPad that will help you visually capture, organize, and store ideas and information wherever you are.”
WordWeb Dictionary makes sure you’re choosing the most effective vocabulary AND using it correctly. Here’s how they describe it: “The WordWeb English dictionary and thesaurus: fast searching, spelling suggestions, definitions, usage examples, synonyms, related words – and no adverts. An offline audio version is available separately.”

Do you have a favorite app that helps the writing process? Please share it below.

Top 10 Learning Resources on Curriki

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

Are you curious what learning resources other teachers are using? Here’s a list of the top ten most downloaded resources on Curriki this month. I encourage you to check them out – they’re free to use as-is, share or modify to suit your classroom needs.  Let me know which one is your favorite!

1. Geography Learning Pursuit – for grades 6-8; provides students a self-guided unit to learn the five themes of geography.
2. Catcher in the Rye Unit Plan – for grades 9-12; eight week language arts unit play dealing with J.D. Salinger’s work, Catcher in the Rye.
3. Systems of Equations Baseball – for grades 6-10; review game for systems of equations (and gets the students up and moving too!).
4. Politics and Political Parties: Lesson Plans – for grades 3-8; lesson plans to help students differentiate between political parties and why the party system is functioning in our country.
5. Writing Matters – for grades 3-8; gives teachers powerful new ways to improve student outcomes in writing, utilizing 21st century resources to prepare them for success in school and beyond.
6. Athabasca University ESL Course – for all levels; help students to effectively learn the English language.
7. Math T.V./ Math Playground – for grades 3-8; interactive math tool developed by classroom teachers to help students learn how to solve multistep word problems.
8. Geometry Bingo – for grades 5-6; this bingo game involving visuals helps students learn and identify key vocabulary for geometry.
9. Math Pre-k – Math Game Time – for pre-K; fun math games, worksheets and videos.
10. Prepare for the Science Fair – for grades 3-8; here’s a fun way to get ready for the science fair!

Please share this with a friend or colleague! Thank you.