Top OER Classroom Resources for June

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

We’re featuring June’s top OER resources for elementary, middle and high school students.  Feel free to add them to your collection, modify them, or share them with others!

English Language Arts

ELEMENTARY: Clifford

This resource contains Clifford The Big Red Dog: Interactive Storybooks. Find phonics fun, games, and stories for early readers.

MIDDLE SCHOOL:

Rags to Riches Game Students play ʺwho wants to be a millionaireʺ style game to practice grasping the meanings of words by context clues.

HIGH SCHOOL: Fotobabble

Fotobabble lets users create ʺtalking photosʺ that are completely web-based. Users upload a photo or image, click ʺrecordʺ to record their voices through the computer’s microphone and then click to save and share their new, audio-captioned photos. It’s a great resource for language teachers and ELL teachers.

Social Studies

ELEMENTARY: Summer Coloring Pages

This link takes you to a site with loads of coloring pages to keep kids busy once school lets out.

MIDDLE SCHOOL: Quandary

In QUANDARY, players aged 8-14 shape the future of a new society while learning how to recognize ethical issues and deal with challenging situations in their own lives. Players must make difficult decisions in which there are no clear right or wrong answers but important consequences – to themselves, to others in the colony and to the planet Braxos.

HIGH SCHOOL: World Geography Flashcards

World Geography Flashcards offers 250+ flashcards with images covering world geography, countries and capitals.

Science

ELEMENTARY: Plant Adaptation Game

In this game, you must choose the best ecoregion for the given plants. This resource is part of the Biology Links for One Laptop Per Child course.

MIDDLE SCHOOL: Code Fred: Survival Mode (Body System Educational Game)

In Code Fred: Survival Mode, you’ll play mini-games to send adrenaline to help Fred run faster, build a blood clot to help heal a wolf bite, prioritize energy intake to the most critical organs, and even fight bacteria invaders after Fred gets sneezed on in the woods.

HIGH SCHOOL: STEMware: Zombie Plague

In STEMware: Zombie Plague, students explore a 3D world where they are responsible for identifying the pathogenic microorganism causing a deadly outbreak and implementing a cure. Embedded assessments allow teachers to track student interactions.

Please share this blog with others who might enjoy these resources.

Technology and Learning Guides from Edudemic

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

Edudemic, an educational technology web site, has produced a very nice set of guides for a set of topics in technology and learning for teachers. These can be found at
http://www.edudemic.com/guides/

The covered topics in the current collection include:

• Twitter
• Flipped Classrooms
• Copyright and Fair Use
• Google Glass
• Badges in Education
• The Library of Congress
• Keeping Students Safe Online
• Choosing the Best Digital Content*
• Digital Scavenger Hunts
• Pinterest in the Classroom

* Please think of Curriki when you are choosing digital content and other OER materials. We have close to 50,000 resources on Curriki!

The guides are no more than few pages in length each, immediately useful and to the point. For example, the Twitter guide has a great list of hashtags you can use in your tweets related to education topics, or just to interpret what others are tweeting. Below is an infographic for popular education-related hashtags.

Edudemic say they plan to provide more guides soon. These 10 guides are definitely worth checking out!

MOOCs for High School

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

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?

Job Trends for this Decade: What are the Implications for Education?

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

A report from Intuit notes that fully 25 to 30% of today’s workforce in the U.S. is already categorized as self-employed or freelancers!

http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/futureofsmallbusiness/intuit_2020_report.pdf

The Intuit report further suggests that through this decade -

“The number of contingent employees will increase worldwide. In the U.S. alone, contingent workers will exceed 40 percent of the workforce by 2020.
• Traditional full-time, full-benefit jobs will be harder to find.
• Small businesses will develop their own collaborative networks of contingent workers, minimizing fixed labor costs and expanding the available talent pool.
• Self-employment, personal and micro business numbers will increase.”

And an article at the Quartz blog site by Jeremy Neuner notes that 40% of the U.S. work force amounts to over 60 million people. Mr Neuner is CEO and co-founder of Next Space, which builds coworking communities.

http://qz.com/65279/40-of-americas-workforce-will-be-freelancers-by-2020/

In 2006 according to a government survey the number was already over 40 million people and around 30% of the workforce. The term “contingent workers” covers contractors, temps and self-employed. Temporary and contract workers represent some 22% of the workforce even at the largest 200 companies.

“The forces behind this sea-change are many: the rapid adoption of mobile technology, ubiquitous internet access, and a general sense of malaise powered by the vague yet nagging notion that we’re just not meant to work all day sitting in a cubicle. Add to that the waste of time, energy and brainpower that commuting engenders, and it becomes apparent that our definition of “workplace” will never be the same. It may seem like a tug of war between companies and workers, but in fact they share common goals: using technology and mobility to maximize productivity, innovation, and well-being.”

Wasted time, energy and brainpower

While the decreasing proportion of traditional jobs may seem like bad news, we are seeing a great resurgence in startup companies, especially in fields like Cloud Computing and Social Media. Thanks to Internet and Cloud computing technologies, starting a new company is much less expensive than before. The genomics revolution is at hand and will generate many new jobs in biotech. And 3-D printing technology will allow a return of manufacturing jobs to the U.S. and increase the opportunity for new small-scale, non-capital intensive, manufacturing companies. These new companies also bring new models of work, a Net-Work model of collaboration via networks of people and the Internet.

The theme of shifting work models was explored in Tom Friedman’s recent article in the N.Y. Times, reporting on his interview withTony Warner, Harvard education specialist and author of the book Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/friedman-need-a-job-invent-it.html?_r=0

Mr. Friedman notes that earning good middle class wages requires a higher level of skill than ever. Skill as used here has a broad context, incorporating critical thinking, creativity, innovation, motivation, communication and teamwork.

Mr. Warner explains that “what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important”.

We know that even full time jobs in large companies are requiring more initiative, creativity, problem solving, teamwork than ever before. Here’s one approach to recommend -

“Finland is one of the most innovative economies in the world,” Warner said, “and it is the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’  They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework, and almost no testing.”

Warner suggests students need to have digital portfolios which they build during their K-12 years and beyond, highlighting critical thinking, communication skills, creativity and initiative. Whether students end up as freelancers or within a large company these skills and the ability to collaborate within real and virtual teams will be vital to success.

Curriki aims to be at the forefront of these education trends by providing free, open source resources that are highly adaptable in support of project-based learning and other methodologies. This is all in support of the goal of helping students develop teamwork and communication skills, creativity and initiative to help them to better succeed in our high-tech world.

Khan Academy in the New World of Common Core Standards

By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

An intern at Khan Academy recently asked for suggestions on a Reddit education site. There was some interesting discussion in response around the efficacy of Khan Academy videos and how these video resources relate to Common Core standards.

One commenter notes that it is harder to grade and check answers with this approach. Another points out that math and science topics are more objective, so potentially more amenable to the use of short video lessons than say, history. “Dr. Momentum” responds that even math and science still involve opinions.

Students need to be able to understand a logical argument, construct a logical argument and refute an incorrect argument. Students need to develop their own reasoning ability. And coherence and depth in teaching a subject, not just subject knowledge, are required from their teachers.

One commenter points out that the Common Core standards for math include Mathematical Practices as well as Mathematical Content. Indeed, Khan Academy is good for the procedural side of things, and in conveying content. Practice transmission, on the other hand, just doesn’t happen on its own, and it’s not enough to explain procedures. It’s about developing expertise in students – “reasoning ability, conceptual understanding and procedural fluency,” among other attributes.

Here are the 8 practices for Math, which you can find at
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Practice
-
MP1: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
MP2: Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
MP3: Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
MP4: Model with mathematics.
MP5: Use appropriate tools strategically.
MP6: Attend to precision.
MP7: Look for and make use of structure.
MP8: Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

Attention to how a student is thinking and attempting to reason is not something a video can do. Don’t get us wrong, we love the Khan videos, and there are many of them accessible from Curriki.

It’s about the connectedness. One can pick up a procedure or three, but until one has the ability to generalize then the subject matter is not really being understood sufficiently. While some students have an innate ability to do this, most will benefit from coaching and development and assistance in seeing the larger context.

The Curriki Algebra 1 course found here is designed to align with Common Core State Standards.

Big Data Analytics for K-12 Personalized Learning

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

There is a rush, perhaps a gold rush, underway in efforts to leverage Big Data analytics to improve K-12 educational results.

A story from Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/03/us-education-database-idUSBRE92204W20130303

reports that a new $100 million data warehouse has been built in the U.S. to monitor academic achievements of public school students, from kindergarten through grade 12. The article states that “The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states.”

Already 9 states in the U.S. are participating to some degree, and two of these, New York and Louisiana, are planning to provide all or most of their student records into the data warehouse. The database includes students names and addresses, and other personal information.

A non-profit named inBloom, Inc. (previously called the Shared Learning Collective) has been established to operate the database, which already contains millions of student files. It is a cloud-based data warehouse for student data such as grades, test results, assessments, standards met, behavior and attendance. It is not a repository for digital content, but will contain links to content, leveraging the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative methodology. The stated goal for the data warehouse is to support more personalized learning.

Here you can watch a video that introduces inBloom’s vision for customized teaching and learning:

A very large amount of data is gathered by school districts and states, but resides in many separate databases and is not cross-correlated or well-analyzed. This project aims to change that. See this Mindshift article:

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/07/how-will-student-data-be-used/

Pulling data together in this way is intended not only to make learning more customized, but also to make it easier to track results as students move from district to district or even state to state. In addition, it will allow data analysis on student achievement to be linked to various learning resources, potentially including the 46,000+ resources on Curriki.

Educational software suppliers are excited by the opportunity to mine the database and better determine what educational products to develop, including educational games and other digital learning products, lesson plans, and reports.

The goals of the project are laudable, but not surprisingly, given the sensitive nature of the data, privacy and security concerns are being raised. inBloom states on their web site: “We recognize the sensitivity of storing student data and place the utmost importance on the privacy and security of that data.” Parents in some states are already raising concerns about potential data leakage. While the data warehouse contains essentially the same data already held in school district databases, it now becomes available to a wider audience, including educators in other states than the original source for the data. And educational content vendors are requesting access to test data, for example. Presumably this will be made anonymous when supplied. Ownership of the data is retained by the states and districts that supply it. But some organizations, including the PTA and ACLU, are already asking “What are the remedies if and when data leaks?”.

We’d be interested to hear what you think about this project. What benefits and risks to you see in amassing a well-integrated and analyzable database of K-12 student achievement? How would you want to see this data being used to improve learning outcomes? Do the benefits outweigh the risks? Please provide comments.