This month's eSchool News includes an article that describes a new website called Curriki which is designed to allow educators from anywhere on the planet to share curricula, lesson plans, and ideas.
Sign up is free, and is available to anyone, including parents.
A search on the website for "science" yielded this site which provides ecology games, this site loaded with award winning science projects, and this site which contains a collection of scores of good educational sites for kids, teachers, and parents includes links to education portals, lesson plans, math, science, social science, nature, health, animals, dinosaurs, insects, reading, and language arts.
A search for "educational technology" yielded a website dedicated to a webquest about the bald eagle in the midwestern United States, particularly along the upper and central lands along the Mississippi River, and this website that contains lesson plan that cover whales.
Current featured content includes:
World Leadership Corps: WLC is a service program dedicated to helping create the leaders of tomorrow. Volunteers are currently working in China, Sweden andthe Dominican Republic developing programs to raise awareness of global issues among local populations.
The Tapestry Project (View Stories): The Tapestry Project, under the aegis of the UN Millennium Project, is encouraging young leaders to create digital stories to raise awareness of key issues in their countries.
http://www.eschoolnews.com
Contents Copyright 2007 eSchool News. All rights reserved.
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Curriki offers new world of course content
New online community promotes free and open collaboration among educators By Corey Murray, Senior Editor, eSchool News January 5, 2007
Imagine
a world where science teachers in India could swap lesson plans with
their counterparts in California, or where students in a rural high
school in Nebraska could try their hand at mathematics problems written
for an audience halfway across the globe--in China, or Germany, or
Italy, for example. Ten years ago, such academic collaborations
would have seemed ridiculous to most classroom educators, many of whom
hardly have enough time during a typical day to network with co-workers
in their own school buildings, much less cultivate relationships with
colleagues hundreds and even thousands of miles away. Thanks
to the internet and the evolution of web-based software programs in
schools, however, many of those geographic barriers no longer exist.
Now, a new online community has emerged that promises to democratize
the process of curriculum development, giving educators the ability to
tailor instructional content to the needs of their students, wherever
they are, free of charge. Dubbed the "Wikipedia of curriculum" by its creators, the online community known as Curriki -- accessible at www.curriki.org
-- aims to provide a place online where educators from anywhere in the
world can post curricula and lesson plans for review and use by fellow
classroom teachers. Like Wikipedia, the organic online
encyclopedia that lets its users edit and update existing entries,
Curriki employs a philosophy of open access, encouraging its members
not only to use the content available on the site, but also to upgrade
it, modify it, and tag it to suit the needs of their students, wherever
they are. The brainchild of Sun Microsystems CEO Scott
McNealy, Curriki was founded as a way to provide disadvantaged teachers
and students around the globe with open and unfettered access to
high-quality educational content. So enamored was McNealy with
his vision that he decided to spin the company off from Sun into its
own freestanding nonprofit organization. Based in Washington, D.C., the
group is led by longtime educational software designer Bobbi Kurshan.
In an interview with eSchool News, Kurshan, whose resume
includes work with industry heavyweights Microsoft Corp. and Apple
Computer, talked about the challenges associated with turning McNealy's
vision into a reality, and particularly with applying the controversial
notion of social networking to open curriculum.
In conversations about the project, Kurshan calls Curikki "a dangerous
and exciting proposition" for education; exciting, she says, for its
ability to revolutionize how educators approach and integrate new
learning resources in their classrooms--and dangerous for its potential
to shake up the current market for traditional, standards-based
curricula in schools. Because Curriki is a free resource based
on an open platform, Kurshan says, the learning materials posted by
members of the community to the web site will be accessible to
educators anywhere in the world, regardless of their computer's
operating system, as long as they have an internet connection.
That means educators in Germany or England, for example, will be able
to post and share resources with the same freedom and ease as teachers
in the U.S. or India, wherever they are. For schools, Kurshan
says, the benefits of such a resource are obvious. For one, it gives
educators across the globe a chance to review and integrate learning
resources beyond those immediately available to them in their own
schools or districts; second, she says, Curriki's open architecture
lets participating educators tailor the content to meet the needs of
their students; and third, because the resource is free, it gives
teachers and students--especially those who hail from rural and
disadvantaged communities--access to high-quality educational content
at no cost. At a time when schools everywhere are charged with
preparing their students to succeed in an increasingly competitive
global economy, Kurshan said, the hope is that Curriki will empower
"the haves to help the have-nots." But Curriki isn't simply
about giving teachers access to more resources--it's bigger than that,
says Kurshan, who believes the site also will help start "a wave of
conversations in schools about what it means to be open." Open
technologies have been widely adopted by colleges and universities for
years, she says, but K-12 schools have been slow to catch on. The hope
is that open solutions such as Curriki--which makes its source code
available for educators to view (though not to edit) online--will help
move that trend forward. Early indications are that, so far, the approach is working.
After celebrating its official launch in October, organizers report
that as of press time membership in the online community had ballooned
to more than 15,000 registered users, with more educators coming online
daily. Already, parents and teachers have written in to offer
their endorsements. William Kaufmann, a parent who has used the site to
find learning materials for his two girls, said the site is perfect for
parents who want to find additional resources for use at home with
their children. "I could go on and on," wrote Kaufmann in a
letter to the organization. "I am very enthusiastic about this site and
its potential." But success rarely comes without its share of
challenges and, as Kurshan tells it, Curriki--despite its potential--is
no exception. For one, she said, educators and others who use
its resources must be willing to accept the fact that Curriki, by its
very nature, represents "a work in progress." Unlike
traditional classroom resources, many of which come store-bought in
boxes, packaged with certificates detailing their effectiveness based
on results culled from carefully constructed focus groups and
control-based research studies, the free-flowing resources featured on
Curriki boast no such guarantees. But that's precisely the
point, says Kurshan. With Curriki, educators can customize the
resources featured on the site to fit their needs and those of their
students. The real benefit comes in the ability to expose educators to
resources they otherwise would never have access to. Getting educators to buy into the philosophy of open curricula won't be easy.
For one thing, Kurshan said, educators, especially in U.S. schools, are
so bound by state and local standards that integrating any resource
into the classroom without prior approval constitutes a risk some might
not be willing to take. Translation also might be a problem.
Because the materials submitted to the site can come from educators
anywhere in the world, Kurshan said, it's not unlikely that some
resources will include grammatical errors and other mistakes that are
the result of language gaps or other cultural misinterpretations.
Rather than shrug those materials off as ineffective or inaccurate,
Kurshan said, the community enables its members to weigh the program
based on its educational merits and potential. If an instructor finds
the pedagogy to be sound, he or she has the ability to update the
lesson and modify it to make it work within any given educational
system. To help educators navigate the community, organizers
are training a group of current and former educators to serve as
mentors, whose jobs it will be to help teachers learn to use the
resource effectively. Curriki also is taking steps to make the
resources more user-friendly, Kurshan said. As the project evolves,
featured curricula will be displayed in a three-tiered system.
The first tier will consist of fresh resources not yet reviewed or
edited by Curriki curriculum experts. These resources will feature a
disclaimer that warns educators to use them at their own peril, said
Kurshan. The second tier will feature only submissions that
have been reviewed by Curriki's curriculum team. In many cases, she
said, Curriki reviewers will contact contributors with suggestions
about how to tweak and improve their lessons before approving them for
use on the site. The third and highest tier will feature
so-called "premiere" curriculum resources that have been validated by
the Curriki team after careful consultation with the author.
Like Wikipedia, Kurshan said, Curriki is an evolving online medium,
which means that the strength of it resources is dependent upon its
ability to cultivate and sustain participation among its users.
As the online community grows, she said, so, too, will the resources
featured on Curriki. The more educators who review the materials, the
more detailed and effective each resource will become. "Users have to understand that they are part of a process," said Kurshan. Links: Curriki Sun Microsystems Inc.
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Just a heads up to folks about what's happening over at Curriki. The site has been adding content and updating tools so that members can develop, publish, and access open source curricula. The new Curriki.org includes something called the Currikulum Builder - it's an editing tool that allows members to develop curriculum materials through a collaborative, wiki-based platform. Here's an interesting lesson that one educator created using the Currikulum Builder:
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_rmlucas/Stoichiometry
There's lots of great stuff and the more the community uses it, the
better it will be. If you haven't already, check it out.
www.curriki.org
Posted by: Bobbi Kurshan | Monday, June 18, 2007 at 02:44 PM