Curriki Library

Federal Government commits to Expanded Access for OER

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Kim JonesBy Kim Jones, CEO, Curriki

The White House last week released its third Open Government National Action Plan. One of the goals of the plan is expanded access to Open Educational Resources. The plan also calls for improved access to publicly available data.

The plan was released to coincide with the Open Government Partnership summit held during the last week of October in Mexico City.

OpenGov1

Here’s what the plan document says about OER:

“Open educational resources are an investment in sustainable human development, they have the potential to increase access to high-quality education and reduce the cost of educational opportunities around the world. Open educational resources can expand access to key educational materials, enabling the domestic and international communities to attain skills and more easily access meaningful learning opportunities.”

Several activities are highlighted:

  • Openly license more Federal grant-supported educational materials and resources
  • Publish best practices and tools for agencies interested in developing grant-supported open licensing projects
  • Convene stakeholders to encourage further open education efforts

The U.S. has become the first country ~ among the 66 countries that are Open Government Partnership members ~ to introduce open education into its national action plan.

An article in EdWeek reports that a number of districts in 6 different states, plus Department of Defense Schools are looking at replacing one or more textbooks with open educational resources. Here’s one suggestion for those districts – math OERs from Curriki. Curriki has curated OERs along a scope and sequence into standards-aligned modules for Pre-algebra, Algebra 1, Geometry, and Calculus courses.

Curriki is pleased with the support of the federal government for expanded access to OER and with federal government efforts to increase free availability of research data. Curriki is taking a leadership position in OER as a repository of over 70,000 open resources available to anyone with a web browser.

10 Most Popular Curriki Learning Resources

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By Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki janetpic_preferred_cropped

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…

10) Tuck Everlasting Novel Study

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.

Tuck Everlasting Novel Study

9) Curriki Geometry Teacher View

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.

Curriki Geometry Teacher View

8) Differentiating Between Different Types of Conflict Collection

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

7) Word Search Games & Other Fun English Language Activities

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

6) Oracle Academy Java Using Alice

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

5) Teaching Fractions Collection

This highly-rated collection of resources includes videos and lessons for teaching fractions.

Teaching Fractions Collection

4) Free High School Science Texts Collection

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

3) Rob Lucas Developing Biology

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.

Rob Lucas Developing Biology

2) Khan Academy Science – Physics

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

1) Rob Lucas Grammar Collection

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.

Rob Lucas Grammar Collection

If you have a favorite Curriki resouce, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you

 

 

 

 

 

Common Core Adoption: A Tale of Two Districts

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janetpintoBy Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

Curriki is following the rollout of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) with great interest, and you will see us report on this regularly in this blog.

Since we have a broad international audience, here is a quick description of the Common Core initiative in the United States. K-12 education in the U.S. is primarily the responsibility of individual states and localities. The CCSS is an initiative whose origins date back to the 1990s. It is sponsored by the state Governors and state education authorities, and currently 44 states (out of 50) are fully participating. CCSS addresses Mathematics and English Language Arts only at present (Science and Humanities subjects are not covered).

According to Wikipedia, “the nation’s governors and corporate leaders founded Achieve, Inc. in 1996 as a bipartisan organization to raise academic standards and graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability in all 50 states…Standards were released for mathematics and English language arts on June 2, 2010, with a majority of states adopting the standards in the subsequent months.”

Curriki is supportive of the objectives of CCSS and we believe that we can contribute significantly, whether in the role of supplementary curricular materials or indeed, in a more central role.

The upcoming academic year 2014/2015 represents a key year in the CCSS rollout. While CCSS outlines standards and requirements, it does not provide curricula. It is up to each state and each district to determine what materials to use. Publishers of textbooks and other learning materials are naturally working toward adhering to CCSS standards. But this is a very large change and some updated textbooks are being criticized as just representing a rehash of older material rather than a fully top-down restructuring and redesign in order to fully adhere to the spirit and guidelines of CCSS.

Here’s an article comparing the experiences of two different districts –

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/04/23/29cc-curriculum.h33.html

One district is in the state of California (Long Beach) and the other is in Florida (Orlando). According to the Edweek article:

“They solved that problem in very different ways. The Florida group scoured the market and chose a suite of materials from a major publisher. Their colleagues across the country, dissatisfied with that same marketplace’s offerings—and limited by their thin pocketbook—wrote their own curriculum.”

The article notes that many districts across the country have delayed updating textbooks and curricular materials as they waited to see what publishers would produce. The district in Florida picked materials primarily from one publisher based on perceived “reflection of the common core and for having a better digital component and better interventions for students with weak skills”.

However the Long Beach district in California took a different path. Given their budget realities, and the slow schedule for CCSS rollout at their state level, they chose to retain their existing mathematics and English language arts texts, but to build new curricula and materials around those.

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One way to do this – enhance or develop curricula to align to CCSS – is to make use of Curriki! There are over 50,000 open educational resources on Curriki. These are available for free to build new curricula and supplement existing curricula. For example, Curriki Geometry is a complete geometry course, free at currikigeometry.org. Curriki’s Project-Based Learning and Common Core Aligned Geometry course will help your students build the skills and confidence that will help them conquer mathematical problems and develop 21st century skills such as communication, collaboration, and teamwork.

We will continue to report to you on CCSS adoption experiences and issues across the U.S. 

Best Online Math Resources

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math-blogBy Janet Pinto, Chief Academic Officer, Curriki

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Many children don’t understand why they need to learn math if they’re not studying to become an engineer or an accountant.  But we use math every day, whether we’re calculating a meal tip or budgeting for a big ticket item.

At Curriki, we offer more than 10,500 math resources  designed for grades K-12. And the best part is that they’re FREE for teachers, students and parents to use.

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Our two newest math courses are now available: Curriki Algebra and Curriki Geometry.  Both curricula are aligned to Common Core Standards and use project-based teaching methods to engage today’s “digital” student through interactive technologies, videos, real-world examples and more.

Here are several sites that offer quality math resources:

Khan Academy – A popular site among teachers and students alike, Khan Academy offers thousands of videos for students to learn at their own pace.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics – Illuminations offers standards-based math resources for K-12 teachers including online activities and lessons.

PBS Teacher’s Math  – You can search for math resources by grade level or subject, which all have a focus on games and interactivity.

Super Kid’s Math – This site not only rates educational software, but offers a handy way to easily create math drill worksheets.

Inside Mathematics   – This is a professional resource for teachers and features innovative teaching methods and tools and promotes the sharing of best practices.

Passy’s World of Mathematics  – A blog written by Passy, a teacher of mathematics and ICT (information and communications technology) sharing “all the fun ways of doing mathematics online 24×7.”

Curriki –  –10,000+ math resources that can be personalized for different styles of learning and range from lessons and workbooks, to interactive games and videos.

[Note: Curriki also offers 1000s of resources in other subject areas such as ELA, science, arts , world languages, education technology and more.]

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