By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki
Here are 5 excellent sites for free STEM resources.
1. NASA’s TeachStation
The site TeachStation has resources about the International Space Station and STEM activities on the ISS. Included are student projects and a series of videos demonstrating STEM concepts for students in the middle grades and high school. Concepts covered include Newton’s laws, microgravity, and surface tension. TeachStation is at this link:
By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki 
We’re already a quarter into the new calendar year, so we’d like to kick it off with a collection of our most popular learning resources this school year. As always, these high quality resources are free to use, share and customize, so you definitely should take a look at! Counting down from number 10…
This resource provides an excellent 25 day unit on the novel Tuck Everlasting. With an emphasis on questioning, particularly question-answer relationships, the novel study materials guide students to develop critical thinking skills. All materials like question cards, game instructions, graphic organizers, rubrics, templates for character development, vocabulary development, etc., are included in this thorough, comprehensive, highly usable resource.
A Collection of various lesson plans including: Selling Geometry, Designing a Winner, What is your angle, Pythagoras?, TED Talk: House of the Future, The Art of Triangles, How random is my life?
All of the lesson plans provide detailed instructions on how to run the lesson making it a great resource for teachers and instructors.
This lesson is part of a larger unit on the Great Depression. In this unit, students will be focusing on determining importance; summarizing; making predictions; recognizing plot structure; and identifying flashbacks, foreshadowing and setting. Wherever possible, mini-lesson texts relate to American life in the 1930s, and all students will be reading literature circle novels set during this time period in American history.
In today’s lesson, students will practice differentiating between different kinds of conflict.
Inside, you will find a detailed lesson plan, a student worksheet, two overhead transparencies for use with the lesson, and exit slips to asses student mastery of today’s objective.
This resource is part of the Great Depression Unit collection.
Differentiating Between Different Types of Conflict Collection
This web site is for people studying English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL). There are quizzes, word games, word puzzles, proverbs, slang expressions, anagrams, a random-sentence generator and other computer assisted language learning activities.
Word Search Games & Other Fun English Language Activities
This workshop engages students with little or no programming experience to learn basic Java programming concepts. Participants use Carnegie Mellon’s Alice* platform to do something fun – create animated stories, movies and games.
Getting Started with Java Using Alice
This highly-rated collection of resources includes videos and lessons for teaching fractions.
This 154-page document contains Earth Science course curriculum for grades 9 – 10. The collection has been prepared from resources contributed by teachers and partner educational organizations on Curriki, an online community for creating and sharing open source curricula.
Free High School Science Texts Collection
This collection contains a wide variety of activities, labs, slide shows and worksheets on the topics of Cells, Cellular Transport, DNA, Photosynthesis & Respiration, Mitosis & Meiosis, Genetics, Evolution, and Classification. Much of the material is suitable for both middle school and high school students, although some of the pieces (such as the Photosynthesis PowerPoint presentation) have complex material better suited for more advanced biology classes.
This collection contains about 100 videos, covering all topics in a complete high school or college course in Physics. Many of the videos demonstrate solutions to sample problems. This is excellent primary material for long distance learning, or rich supplementary material for any physics course.
Khan Academy Science – Physics
Always in our top 10 resources, this grammar collection is an extremely rich resource offering a complete unit on teaching grammar in a fun way. The content is correct, thorough and appropriate. Inclusion of a version of Mad Libs and a collaborative group project/presentation offers as much creativity for teaching grammar as possible. A humorous poem in worksheet form makes the lesson engaging and interesting. A scoring guide for the presentation makes the unit meaningful and understandable to students. The unit uses many various strategies to enhance the content.
If you have a favorite Curriki resouce, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you
By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki
A study from Student PIRGS (Student Public Interest Research Groups) across the nation has found that college and university students could save over $1000 per year if all textbooks were provided open source materials.
The report is based on pilot programs at 5 different university campuses, and is available here. It notes that “According to the College Board, the average undergraduate student should budget between $1,200 and $1,300 for textbooks and supplies each year. That’s as much as 40% of tuition at a two-year community college and 13% at a four-year public institution.” The report notes that the college textbook market is artificial, since there is no direct consumer – producer link, as indicated in the figure below. A handful of academic publishers dominate the traditional textbook market.
Open textbooks are high quality, faculty-written and peer-reviewed materials. They are available online and for electronic distribution in .pdf or other formats. The cost to students for open source materials is minimal.
The findings are based on 21,697 students enrolled in OER courses at Kansas State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), the University of Minnesota, and Tacoma Community College. The aggregate results indicate that students could save on average about $128 per course. Extrapolated to an academic year this is over $1000 per student per year. If all the 11 million full-time undergraduates in the U.S. were using only open textbooks, the aggregate savings would be well over $1 billion per year.
As the growth of open textbooks spreads at the university level, we at Curriki expect increasing activity in the K-12 space as well. State and local authorities could save substantial amounts from their education budgets by moving to open textbooks. Curriki is a repository for a wide variety of open source educational materials, including full courses and textbooks. We’d like to call your attention to several high school level mathematics courses:
Curriki Algebra 1 – http://library.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_kathyduhl/Algebra1?bc=&viewer=info
Curriki Geometry – http://www.currikigeometry.org
Curriki Calculus – http://library.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_Group_CurrikiCalculusCollection/CurrikiCalculusIntegralCalculus?bc=&viewer=info
There are also many full textbook resources on Curriki. A search for high school math level textbooks alone reveals over 200 resources. We encourage you to search at Curriki for core or supplementary textbook resources that you can use in your classroom!
By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki
Here is a list of the most popular Curriki resources and collections in 2014. A few of these keep popping up on our top lists (timeless appeal), so it’s worth a quick read. (If you do, your job will be much easier and you’ll save hours on prep and research!)
Drum roll, please…
Most downloaded resource in 2014: The Art of Triangles TE and SE from Curriki Geometry
Most Popular collection: English 10 Full Course Contributed by Sarah Lornston
Hottest eTextbook: Mathematics etextbook by Free High School Science Texts
Top STEM resource: Math Simulations Collection
Best Science Video Collection: AP Chemistry Video Collection
Top Computer Science Resource: Oracle Academy’s Getting Started with Java Using Alice
Special Collection Selection: One Million Lights Solar Energy Curriculum- High School
Most Interactive Resources for AHA Moments: The Concord Consortium Interactives
Top Science Resource: Open Source CA Textbook – Earth Science Grades 9-10
Top Mathematics Resource: Curriki Geometry Project Based Learning
Top Social Studies Resource: High School American History Curated Collections
Top English Language Arts Game: Word Search Games and other Fun English Language Activities
Top Literature Study Unit: Tuck Everlasting Novel Study contributed by Holly Mercado and consistently ranked in our Top 10 resources!
Top Health Resource: Fitness for Life contributed by Kathy Furka
Top Art resource: New Media for Social Commentary contributed by Adam Kenner
Top World Languages Resource: Spanish Verbs with Spelling Changes Worksheet
Newest Collection: Our Lives, Our Words: Improving Student Writing through Digital Photography – First Grade Projects
This is a handy list that everyone can benefit from – teachers, students, parents, educators, or anyone who’s interested in learning. Please pass this on to your friends and colleagues. Thank you!
