What is Curriki? – A Community

By Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

Is Curriki a learning service? Is Curriki a not-for-profit organization? Is Curriki a repository for free, open and shareable curricular materials?

Yes, all of these, but more. At its heart, Curriki is a global community, composed of educators, teachers, parents and students. It is a community that recognizes the value of having a large repository of vetted K-12 learning materials that are not only free, but available for sharing, mixing and matching, and repurposing to particular needs for classrooms around the world.

Curriki hosts more than 53,000 resources that range from simple lessons to full courses, all of which have been donated by teachers and our Partners in the last six years. Everyone in the world has free and open access to not only use the resources we have, but can remix, reuse and share them with the Curriki community and the world at large.

Contribute by uploading your original lesson plans, units, courses, and other learning resources to share with fellow teachers – anything from simple time-saving tips, to complete standards-based lesson plans. Just go to the Publish Resources page to get started. We’ll walk you through it! You will be able to enter details or “metadata”, such as keywords, that enable others to find your content easily. You will also be able to select the creative Commons license that is best for you. Learn more about, and choose from, Creative Commons Licenses here.

For example, you can:

• Add lesson plans (or other materials) from your computer. Curriki supports Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, .notebook, and other file formats.
• Upload videos
• Create your own lesson plans with our templates or from “scratch” with our wiki tools.

We encourage you to publish your best curricula and learning materials for educators around the world to see and use. Our goal is to provide excellent content. Uploaded content can be nominated for expert review. Reviewed resources are tagged with their rating (1, 2, or 3) and a narrative review by a member of the Curriki Review Team.

Besides contributing resources, as part of the Curriki community you can Join Collaborative Networking Groups in order to connect with fellow educators and exchange ideas, best practices, and curricula. There are over 750 groups on Curriki today, across many areas of interest and various geographies. You can also subscribe to our blog feed for insights and recommended resources from Curriki, fellow teachers, and industry experts. Add your own comments to the conversation.

If you are not already a Curriki member, please join! It’s free, and it’s easy. As a Curriki member, you can use and affect the resources you find in many ways, helping to develop the repository for your own use and in support of others.

Login or Join to add a resource or join one of the many Curriki groups today!

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.

Curriki and Bucket Lists

By Kim Jones, Curriki CEO

A bucket list, from the movie The Bucket List, starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, is a list of things to do before you die. A bucket list for students should have a shorter(!) time line – until before they enter college, or before they enter the workforce.

What should be on such a list? And what would be the purpose of the list? It would prepare them for college if they are attending one and for adulthood, employment and citizenship.

Here’s one such list, for K-12 students, from a recent blog at the ASCD (The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) website:

• Communication Skills
• Collaboration Skills
• Time Management
• Interview Skills
• Personal Financial Literacy
• Digital Literacy
• Ability to analyze multiple perspectives
• Ability to share his or her own perspective (i.e., blogs, social media, and creating original work to post online)
• Civic Literacy
• The Tools Needed to Succeed in First Year College Courses, without Remediation
• Resilience
• Punctuality
• Meta-cognition
• Ability to Apply Skills and Adapt Abilities in Different Environments
• Critical Thinking Skills
• Citizenship (The type of skills that apply in most international settings)
• Reading and Writing Skills (not just a passing grade in English, but true skills)
• Global Awareness
• College Knowledge (What Does It Take to Get Into College? – See David Conley’s books and articles)
• Students Who Understand the Importance of Community Service

These skills are largely outside of the purview of standard curricula and textbooks. Rather they are the set of skills associated with learning to think, with maturity, with being responsible and “well-rounded”.

Curriki is a great place to find resources on these topics; just searching on Curriki for the first half dozen items in the list, we find thousands of hits.

• Communication skills (1899 hits)
• Collaboration skills (1829 hits)
• Time management (2500 hits)
• Interview skills (1864 hits)
• Financial literacy (1829 hits)
• Digital literacy (2318 hits)

We recommend that you look to Curriki to help students with developing these “bucket list” skills that are so important to life. And we welcome additional contributions in these categories to the Curriki repository.

What do you think should be on such a bucket list? We’d like to receive your comments.