Curriki Celebrates Six Year Anniversary!

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

Curriki is celebrating our 6-year anniversary this week. For 6 years, Curriki has been the leading K-12 global community for teachers, students and parents to create, share, and find free and open learning resources that improve teacher effectiveness and student outcomes. We are pleased to be going strong and we thank you for your support and engagement, whether you just joined this year or have been involved with us for several years.

The name Curriki is derived from the words “curriculum” and “wiki”. Here’s how our mission is described at Wikipedia:

Curriki’s mission is to use technology to help break down economic and geographic barriers that prevent children worldwide from having access to quality education, and thereby to make learning possible for anyone, anywhere in the world. Curriki’s model is to develop curricula through community contributors, and to deliver curricula and open educational resources globally. Anyone with access to the Internet can contribute and use the material found on Curriki to teach themselves or others. Since the materials, which include digital textbooks, learning videos, and interactive resources, are provided in open source, they can be adapted as needed to particular requirements inside or outside of the classroom.

Curriki continues to grow rapidly. The number of resources available at Curriki has doubled just in the last 4 years, and is now at 45,000. The number of members has grown to over 300,000, more than tripling in that same period. There have been over 7.5 million unique visitors to the Curriki site! And there are 678 groups within the Curriki family that have established by our members.

Curriki’s pre-history was in 2004 and 2005 and saw the development of the original concepts for a global education community, spearheaded by Scott McNealy and myself when Scott was the CEO at Sun Microsystems and I lead the Sun Education group for the company. Working in the technology field and with the education community, we were able to see the potential to leverage the Internet and technology more broadly to address the mission as stated above.

We launched Curriki in 2006 as a non-profit organization, and the initial website was launched in 2007. The first contribution was from Kevin Driscoll. In the same year the Curriki review team was launched. In 2009 we added a full chemistry curriculum.

Highlights in the current year of 2012 included a significant redesign of the Curriki web site, the launching of the Curriki Algebra 1 course, and the 300,000^th member joining Curriki.

We look forward to increasing Curriki’s capabilities in the coming years and to continuing to help you achieve successful educational results!

Seeing Science All Around

Where does science happen?

We use language arts every day, reading everything from road signs to gossip magazines to newspapers. We use mathematics at the grocery market, or when we figure out the tip at a restaurant, or worry about gas mileage on a road trip. We see social studies in action every time we look out at a crowd of people, or wander through a museum.

But science? For many students, science only exists in the classroom, during tedious labs or teacher-controlled experiments.

There is a new message for students: Science is everywhere!

As your students prepare to leave the classroom for two glorious months of summer vacation, help them get ready to experience the world around them with new scientific eyes.

Using these resources from Curriki, open students’ minds to science outside the classroom!

For young learners

Learn About Water Towers: Curriki contributor Warren Buckleitner was asked one day, “I have always been interested in water towers and have always wondered, do those big ball-like tops really hold water or not?” So he decided to dig up some Internet sites to tell us more about these roadside wonders. This investigation is a great opportunity for young students to learn about science at work in their community.

Unit on Plants: Parents will be very pleased that their youngster has learned about plants before getting to work in the garden this summer. In addition, the students can conduct an experiment in which they collect, observe and log plant data in their science journal notebooks. Send little gardeners home for summer vacation, and see what they have to report in the fall!

For Big Kids

Bridges: Chances are, if you are driving to the beach this summer, or going on a camping trip, or going fishing, or even biking to the nearest pool, you will cross a bridge. Through these videos and computer resources, students can gain a basic understanding of how bridges work, and begin designing and building their own!

A Matter of Chocolate: What would summer be without ‘smores? Those delicious campfire treats of toasted marshmallows, crisp graham crackers and melting chocolate can make your mouth water just writing about them! Prepare your students for a chocolate-y summer with this unit on the history and chemistry of chocolate

High School and Beyond

Ergonomic Chair Design: Whether lounging by the pool, barbeque, or campfire, your students will spend at least part of their summer sitting down. What if they could sit in a chair that they designed? This open-ended design lesson will give them that opportunity! Students work in small groups and must research and develop a new chair design.

Looking for even more science lessons, activities, and units? Check out the Focus on: Science section of Curriki.

Do you have a great science lesson that opens students’ eyes to science in our world? Share it with a global audience: apply to Curriki’s Summer of Content program today!

Have a great summer, and remember: Science is out there!

@Curriki

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Photo by: Pink Sherbet via Flickr Creative Commons

Calling all Chemistry Lovers!

What are the objects around us made of?

How heavy is an atom?

What is the difference between ideal gas and non-ideal gas behavior?

Trivia buffs and science whizzes alike can discover answers to the above questions and thousands more in this recently added free and open Chemistry collection provided by FHSST (Free High School Science Texts). FHSST is a project that aims to provide free science and mathematics textbooks for Grades 10 to 12 science learners. The project was initiated by young South African scientists, and now brings together scientists from around the world who are willing to contribute to the writing of the books.

The collection covers three main topics (Matter and Materials, Chemical Change, Chemical Systems) and then within those topics, they are broken down into G10, G11, and G12 chapters. Throughout each clear and comprehensive chapter are embedded activities, worked examples and exercises for exploration and assessment. Each chapter ends with a summary and set of summary exercises.

If you’re out of money for an expensive textbook, just love to learn about science, or know someone in need of chemistry help, this collection is a must click on!

For more free and open science resources, visit our Focus on Science section of Curriki!

@Curriki

www.Curriki.org

Note: The above image is by Andy Schultz and is available under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

California Instructional Materials: An Update

In my last blog, I wrote about how California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had announced a request for publishers to submit free, open source textbooks in high school math and science for use this fall. Since the announcement, the state back-tracked somewhat by making the call for submissions free but not open source. The final approved list of submissions will be locked PDF files of textbooks that will be freely available for 2 years.  To its credit, the State of California has made several significant steps forward in this move. They have gone from the typical 6 year adoption cycle to just two years; they have gone from heavy, physical books to electronic files; and they have gone from expensive to free. What they have not done is allowed the math and science teachers across the State of California to edit, add or improve  any of these submissions. (To read a recent press release from the Office of the Governor pertaining to this initiative, click here.)

Curriki has submitted two books to this process and it is our understanding that both books, one in Chemistry and one in Earth Science, will be among those approved by the California Learning Resource Network, the body charged with performing the review process. At the time of the announcement, expected around August 10, a link to download both of these books will be available on the State’s official free textbook Web site. At the same time, Curriki intends to make both books available in an open source form on Curriki.org and will be reaching out to Earth Science and Chemistry teacher across the state to work with our content. This experiment will be a exciting proof of concept to see if the community actually can and will use open source materials.  We know that classroom teachers across the state have created fantastically engaging lessons, rich with multimedia and hands-on activities. Our hope is that some of these busy science teachers will take the time to supplement the book we have provided with some of this great material they’ve’ developed.

Expect to see and hear much more about this on the Curriki.org site, through our Twitter feeds and through various other outreach efforts. If you have expertise in either of these fields, I urge you to work with us in this historic effort. If you’re not a Earth Science  or Chemistry teacher but you know someone who is, please send them this link and encourage them to join us. Our hope is that by the end of next school year, the open source versions of our books are so vastly improved, that the state moves to make the entire initiative open source, in addition to free. We continue to believe in the power of the community to share their collective knowledge. Please help us to show state education administrators in California and across the nation, that the knowledge of their community is amongst its most powerful resources.

 

Peter Levy

Strategic Development

Curriki