Featured Teacher Sam Stier’s Recommendations

Name: Sam Stier
Role: Curricula developer and teacher trainer
School: Learning with Nature
City, State: Missoula, Montana
Number of years teaching: 11

How I use Curriki: I use Curriki to see how others approach teaching a topic, and just to explore what teaching resources are readily available. The breadth, depth, and quality of the materials available are exceptional. Peer review really matters! The search function of the database is also terrific.

Here are some of my favorite Curriki resources:
* Contagion Lab – How Diseases Spread
* A curriculum unit to introduce engineering to junior high school students
* Fish Mummy Overview
* Play Together, Learn Together
* Inquiries with Acids and Bases

Here is a resource that I’ve contributed to Curriki:
* Concrete without Quarries: a sustainable chemistry lab inspired by nature

See Jemma Heliker’s Favorite Classroom Resources

Name: Jemma Heliker
Role: Middle and High School Language Arts Teacher
School: Mastery Charter, Shoemaker Campus
City, State: Philadelphia, PA
Number of years teaching: 5

How I use Curriki: The resources on Curriki cover every possible subject and area. As a busy teacher, I appreciate the teacher reviews to guide me to outstanding resources. Curriki has definitely improved many of my lessons and units.

Here are some of my favorite Curriki resources:
* MEET ME AT THE CORNER, Virtual Field Trips for Kids
* Middle School Grammar Unit by Robert Lucas
* Writing How – To Resources by Andrea Chen
* Literature Collection by Shmoop

Here are some resources that I’ve contributed to Curriki:
* The Secret Life of Bees Novel Unit
* The Kite Runner Novel Unit

Meet Featured Teacher Nate Merrill!

Name: Nate Merrill
Role: Middle School Social Studies teacher, Technology Integration Specialist
School: Long Trail School
City, State: Dorset, VT
Number of years teaching: 16
Twitter Handle: @Nate_Merrill

How I use Curriki: Curriki is a great site for me to find resources to enhance my teaching repertoire. I enjoy looking for new lessons and sharing my own. I can quickly find inspirational instructional ideas and then adapt them to my needs. Curriki is a great site for new and veteran teachers.

Here are some of my favorite Curriki resources:
* Podcast Collection
* The Constitution
* How do we Progress
* Oceans Alive!
* Political TV Advertisement Project

Here are some resources that I’ve contributed to Curriki:
* Why Use Twitter
* How to Use Twitter

Meet Featured Teacher Andrea Chen!

Name: Andrea Chen
Role: former high school English teacher, current Executive Director at Propeller: A Force for Social Innovation
School: New Orleans Charter for Science and Math High School
City, State: New Orleans, LA
Number of years teaching: 3 in classroom; currently teaching entrepreneurship (among other things) to start-up organizations addressing social and environmental challenges
Twitter: My current organization is @gopropeller

How I use Curriki: When I was a classroom teacher, I used Curriki to find lesson plans and activities for books that I was teaching or wanted to teach in my own classroom. I am no longer in the classroom, but I had posted many of my resources and units on Curriki. It is a wonderful feeling to know that other English teachers around the country have found the resources I created five years ago helpful. It makes me want to go back and create more resources for the community, even though I am no longer teaching English literature!

Here is one of my favorite Curriki resources:
Women in Literature

Here are some resources that I’ve contributed to Curriki:
* Invisible Man Reading Guide, Vocabulary, and Assessments
* Short Story Unit
* Drama Unit: Waiting for Godot
* Literary Analysis Essay Outline Graphic Organizer
* Catcher in the Rye Unit Guide

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!