November 20, 2009 by Curriki
This week, Curriki’s Executive Director Bobbi Kurshan and I are in Doha, Qatar receiving the WISE Award for Innovation. This inaugural meeting of what will now be an annual event has brought together about 1000 thought leaders from five continents. Aimed at being a sort of Davos for education, the themes of the conference are “Pluralism, Sustainability and Innovation”.
The conference organizers have set up a booth for each of the six award winners where we’re each able to showcase the work our projects are doing and meet with a steady stream of conference attendees. Just like when I attend education conference back in the U.S., I’ve yet to get to a single conference sessions, because I’ve been busy meeting people and talking about how Curriki could be deployed in various regions of the world. My shirt pocket has a thick stack of business cards from an incredible gamut of education leaders, representing a virtual United Nations of interested potential partners. Specifically we’ve met leaders of non-profits from the UK and Paraguay; government officials from Thailand, the Philippines, Bahrain and Egypt; the founder and chief education officer of a wealthy and influential foundation in India; for-profit organizations from Malaysia and Jordan and reporters from Qatar, Hungary, Lebanon and the U.S. Come to think of it, we also met the Director of the Regional Bureau for Education in Africa for UNESCO who, along with her attaché expressed strong interested in using Curriki for a major teacher training effort in Senegal. Turns out some of the folks we’re meeting here represent the actual United Nations.
Meetings like this are important to Curriki because they give our tiny organization that has essentially no marketing budget a platform to present to a who’s who of global policy makers. The only way we can realize a vision of sharing open education resources around the world is to find partners who can take our platform and localize it, maintain it and drive usage. What comes next is the vital follow up. We don’t expect and frankly couldn’t handle it if each of the potential opportunities spawned a local Curriki instance. But like venture funding, you have to pitch a lot of deals if you want one or two to close.
I’ve long believed that in many respects, the need for a site like Curriki is far greater in the developing world than it is in the U.S. After the award ceremony, I’ll pack up and head back on a 14 ½ hour flight back to NY. Based on the week we’ve had, I suspect I’ll have a whole new set of opportunities to rack up frequent flyer miles.
Peter Levy
Strategic Development
www.Curriki.org
Tags: Barbara Kurshan, Doha, Peter Levy, Qatar, WISE, World Innovation Summit for Education
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November 18, 2009 by Curriki
Each month, Curriki tries to harness a little bit of your ideas to better understand the teaching landscape, and to help inform future development of the site. We appreciate your input and may publish select responses anonymously.
November’s Survey explores how you search for what, and why.
To find out more about finding and collecting resources on Curriki, check out the “Find” page.
Tags: Curriki, Curriki survey, OER, open education resources
Posted in Curriki Tips | Leave a Comment »
November 16, 2009 by Curriki
In many schools, saying the Pledge of Allegiance is a common everyday occurrence. But what do your students know about the history of the flag and the use of symbols in their everyday life? This week Curriki member, Andrew Doyle has submitted a lesson plan designed to give K-3 students an opportunity to explore the meaning of symbols, background information about the American Flag and a chance to create a symbolic group flag.
This lesson also includes many resource books, a rubric to gauge student’s success, and alignment to national standards. Most of all, this lesson will surely deepen your students understanding of how symbols are an important part of their everyday life.
Kathy Duhl
Lead Content Reviewer
www.Curriki.org
Tags: American Flag, Andrew Doyle, Curriki, Kathy Duhl, OER, open education resources, Pledge of Allegiance, Social Studies, US History
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November 14, 2009 by Curriki
In his recent New York Times article, “Virtual Classrooms Could Create a Marketplace for Knowledge,” author Anad Girdharadas writes:
In the autumn of 1963, the American magazine Popular Mechanics heralded an innovation that seemed bound to change the world: the ‘teacherless classroom’ … Fate and technology have pummeled many professions since 1963, from bookseller to travel agent to auto worker. But teachers have resisted the powerful forces reorganizing industry. The dream of the teacherless classroom has remained just that … Today the dream has returned.
Citing examples such at the Open Courseware Consortium, to iTunes U to Curriki, Girdharadas points out that education is no longer a seller’s market, where deans decide what you know, at what cost and where. With an increasing number of university professors and subject-specific enthusiasts putting their course materials and expertise online in multimedia formats, students (poor, rich, young and old) have a significant number of options when it comes to where to get (or rather how to build) an education. Furthermore, with this abundance of free or almost free courses and education resources online, universities and other certificate granting institutions have to compete on quality, price and convenience more than ever before.
Taking all of this into account, what do the aforementioned changes and market pressures mean for teachers and professors in terms of their role within the classroom and education marketplace? Or, as Independent Thinking founder Ian Gilbert writes in his forthcoming book, “Why do I need a Teacher when I’ve got Google?”
Scott McNealy, Founder of Sun Microsystems and Curriki, states that educators will have to re-envision themselves as coaches. Their focus should move increasingly towards motivating learners and customizing materials to individual students, often including the work and expertise of others in the process. Or, as this Edutopia article points out, “It is better to coach than cajole”.
What do readers think? With the recent digital education explosion, how will (or rather how should) the role of the teacher and professor change? Where will educators teach/coach? How can we better prepare educators for their new roles and responsibilities in education?
Anna Batchelder
Curriki International Consultant
www.Curriki.org
Tags: Anad Girdharadas, Anna Batchelder, coaching, Curriki, Education, Edutopia, iTunes U, OER, online education teacherless classroom, Open Courseware Consortium, open education resources, Scott McNealy
Posted in Ed Tech, OER News, Open Source Education | 3 Comments »
November 11, 2009 by Curriki
Some technology pundits claim that voicemail and email are passe, and believe that communication will instead flourish through SMS, IM, Twitter, and social networking sites. If you’re with them, and feel like you want to receive less email from Curriki, you can now update your account settings in My Curriki to control this feature. Go to the My Profile tab, either by clicking on your “Welcome” message, or from the link in the left navigation menu (make sure you’ve logged in first).
Curriki will never share your email information. If you choose to allow emails, you will receive our monthly newsletters and other notification emails from Curriki. By default, new members are opted-in to all communications from Curriki. You can change this setting to receive only specific types of emails (i.e., only newsletters), or to never receive unrequested emails. Please note that emails to retrieve a forgotten Member Login or Password as well as emails from Curriki’s File Check system always override your setting for Email Options. For more information, please read the Privacy Policy.
Or, maybe you haven’t been getting our newsletters and would like to receive them? Use this same setting to opt-in to Curriki emails, and also verify that the email address listed in your account settings is correct and up-to-date.
If you do choose to opt out of email, make sure you follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook fan page or LinkedIn group to stay current on our latest news and announcements!
Tags: Curriki, Curriki mail, email, newsletters, opt-out
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November 9, 2009 by Curriki
Only autumn’s harvest and some great planning can explain Curriki’s bounteous curricular stock: an entire Grade 10 English course, an Earth Systems science curriculum lauded by the Curriki Review System and users alike, and a group that seeks your help in adding to their strong work on an algebra curriculum.
Check out this stellar curriculum for Grade 10 English.
Fiction, Homonyms, Persuasive Writing, Personal Essays, Antigone, Socratic Seminars, Julius Caesar, Rhetoric . . . AND MORE. Each of these units has been reviewed individually, but as a collection, this resource stands out for its variety, ease of use, creativity and depth. A user states: “This collection of 10th grade English literature units is an excellent example of how Curriki offers teachers high quality content for free. Every single unit is ready to use, thorough and interesting.”
Or, one fan of this Earth Systems curriculum comments that “these activities bring the abstract into the more tangible realm, while teaching good earth science. I can’t wait to try these lessons in my classroom!” This multi-unit curriculum is meant for students who have already progressed through some earth science classes, and there are many lessons and activities within the collection that can be pulled out and used separately from the curriculum as a whole.
Curriki’s featured group seeks to improve upon some already great standard algebra curriculum.
The core beliefs of the “Implementing Algebra” group: 1) The difference between an okay curriculum and a great one is thousands of hours of meticulous research and revision. 2) Struggling students are more successful, not less so, when they’re given complex work that engages their higher-order thinking skills, as long as that work is designed appropriately.
An initial project will be to create alternate units to replace weak spots in the generally excellent Carnegie Learning Algebra I curriculum, including all the supplementary materials to implement the units for students’ success. If this project speaks to you, request membership to this group, or watch as the curriculum develops!
Meredith Phillips
Executive Editor
www.Curriki.org
Tags: algebra, Earth Science, English, Grade 10 English, Meredith Phillips
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