Name:

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

Name:

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

Name:

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

Name:

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

Name:

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

We recommend you take a look at the free key tools and resources for Project-Based Learning (PBL) which have been placed on Curriki by Thom Markham. These are for the purpose of designing and implementing rigorous, engaging, authentic projects in K-12 classrooms. The resources including rubrics, planning forms, and design tools, are here: http://goo.gl/DkFTV

And here’s a short video from the Buck Institute of Education introducing PBL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMCZvGesRz8

The CCSS (Common Core State Standards) have been adopted by 45 of the 50 states in the U.S. and are designed to “emphasize creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, presentation and demonstration, problem solving, research and inquiry, and career readiness” as Dr. Markham describes in this blog entry:

http://www.thommarkham.com/blog/default/pbl-and-common-core-standards/

He suggests that moving toward PBL provides a methodology and path for educators to begin to meet the challenge of teaching to these Common Core standards. But it should be PBL of high quality.

Dr. Markham identifies 6 ‘moving parts’ for PBL:

1. Moving from instruction to inquiry 
2. Balancing knowledge and skills 
3. Going deep 
4. Teaching teamwork
5. Establishing a culture of inquiry
6. Blending coaching with teaching

Here’s another of his blogs which describes how one designs high quality PBL resources. http://edge.ascd.org/_Designing-High-Quality-PBL/blog/5650895/127586.html

And for some specific resources, you can investigate this exemplary set of resources – project-based science and math inquiries at the fifth and sixth grade levels. http://goo.gl/D1UZB

Enjoy!

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are one major result of the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement. They have been around a few years, but really took off with major visibility and growth last year. The best known MOOC organizations are edX, Coursera, and Udacity.

These are all organizations founded by universities or growing out of universities, and they are focused on undergraduate-level courses.

What about extending MOOCs to the high school level? A CalTech MOOC on machine learning, targeted at the undergraduate level,  attracted roughly 10,000 high school level students out of the 100,000 who signed up. Clearly there is interest coming from high school students!

Brown University may be the first to have created a MOOC for the high school level, with the preparation of an overview course on engineering under development. The course is designed to expose students to the possibilities available to them in engineering majors and careers. A blog from the New York Times discusses this new MOOC for high school students.
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/brown-university-creates-a-mooc-for-high-school-students/

There are at least a dozen courses delivered by M.I.T.’s Open Courseware program (the original basis of edX) that have been addressed to high school students and not only in math, science and engineering disciplines (including astrophysics, calculus and audio electronics). There are also courses in the humanities as well. Online resources including videos of lectures and other course materials for these are available at:
http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/courses/

Image from an MIT high school course: Crab Nebula X-ray pulsar. Credit:  NASA/CXC/SAO/F. Seward et al.

There’s even a Spanish language MOOC resource currently linked from Curriki which could be useful for advanced Spanish language learners in high school.

What do you think, do you see this as a possibility in your own community or district? Do you know of other high school level MOOCs currently available or under development?

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!

It’s no coincidence that we are unveiling some big news this month.  After all, it is Mathematics Awareness Month .

Today, Curriki announced a new online project-based geometry course that will be available free to teachers and students!

Geometry is arguably one of the most useful math subjects. It touches many aspects of our everyday lives, from art and driving, to sports and construction. We’re excited that this new Geometry course is based on the popular Project Based Learning  (PBL) “active” approach and is designed to appeal to today’s generation of students, who expect an interactive, digitally-connected experience.

If you’re not familiar with Project Based Learning (PBL), this approach teaches both doing, as well as learning, and gives students real-world opportunities to think analytically, formulate ideas, and solve increasingly complex problems. We’re a big fan!

Developed with funding from AT&T and available online, this course is also aligned to Common Core State Standards.

“Students are going to love geometry after taking this course!” said Kim Jones, Curriki CEO. “So many students hate math because it’s difficult to make a real-life connection between math and their everyday lives.  By adopting a Project Based Learning approach, we show students that geometry is not only theoretical, but practical and necessary. Students will move beyond a basic understanding of concepts to enjoyment of discovery.”

The online Curriki Geometry course will be available in September 2013. To participate in the beta launch, sign up today and we’ll notify you when the course is available.

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

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