Given your interest in history, civics and world affairs, we thought you would enjoy the following highlights from the Curriki Social Studies Collection. For more featured Social Studies content, check out our Focus on Social Studies page.

Resources for Elementary School

• Knowing Native Americans by teacher Melissa Webber: This unit will introduce students to Native Americans. It will provide an overview of various Native American groups in different geographical locations across America. The unit will progress into an in-depth study of the Wampanoag Indian Tribe, including an examination of daily family life and how the tribe met their basic needs. Furthermore, the unit will cover the Wampanoag’s role in helping the Pilgrims and celebrating the first Thanksgiving.
• A Matter of Chocolate by Curriki member Sarah Wostbrock: A Social Studies and Science integrated thematic unit on the history and chemistry of chocolate, this comprehensive interdisciplinary resource promises to be highly engaging. Students will participate in the preparation of various treats as they explore physical and chemical changes. Students begin classifying and graphing from the first lesson and use a variety of other scientific process skills throughout the rest of the 5-lesson unit. Students will read “The Story of Chocolate” and be responsible for presentations on the role of chocolate in various cultures throughout history.

For Middle School

• Social Studies 7 (World History) by educator Robert Lucas: This is an excellent collection of resources for teaching World History. There are units with detailed lessons plans and valuable materials to support each activity. Each unit is filled with a variety of activities including mapping, writing, debates, readings, movies, skits, quizzes, final assessments and much more. Some of the highlights include learning about Independence in India through watching the movie Gandhi and participating in a Socratic seminar and studying about Empires by working with small groups on a layered curriculum activity.
• Middle Ages WebQuest by IB educator David Carpenter: This WebQuest on the Middle Ages is designed as a complete unit of study. The resource outlines the definition of a WebQuest and gives many links to other resources related for research. Students are asked to research a role from medieval society and to play that role in classroom reenactments. Teachers will find a vast array of useful ideas and creative avenues for academic exploration of this complex time period.

For High School

• Turkey: Global Studies Units and Lesson Plans by the World Affairs Council: This is an excellent collection of resources for teaching about The Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire. The lessons are geared towards increasing subject matter understanding and developing important academic skills. Each activity is full of accurate content, thoughtful instructional strategies, and great handouts. Some of the highlights include an introductory activity on primary sources which has students think about what they might include in a time capsule, a web “scavenger hunt” about Constantinople/Istanbul, and a mapping activity examining military conquests under Suleiman.
• Entrepreneurship Learning Activities by the Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education CEE: This resource contains a variety of activities and lessons that aim to teach student about entrepreneurship. Make sure to check out What’s In It for Me? and Bagel Business Basics!

Have a great Social Studies lesson you’d like to share? Post your lesson on Curriki and then send us the link on Twitter (@Curriki). Selected lessons will be featured in future blog posts and added to the Focus on Social Studies page highlights.

Sincerely,

@Curriki

www.Curriki.org

Scroll to page 56 of the document and you will see the following shout out to the OER movement:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are an important element of an infrastructure for learning. OER come in forms ranging from podcasts to digital libraries to textbooks, games, and courses. They are freely available to anyone over the web.

Educational organizations started making selected educational materials freely available shortly after the appearance of the web in the mid-1900s. But MIT’s decision to launch the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative to make the core content from all its courses available online in 2000 gave the OER movement a credible start (Smith, 2009). Other universities joined the OCW Consortium, and today there are more than 200 members, each of which has agreed to make at least 10 courses available in open form.

Many of these materials are available not just to individuals enrolled in courses, but to anyone who wants to use them. The power of OER is demonstrated by the fact that nearly half the downloads of MIT’s OpenCourseWare are by individual self-directed learners, not students taking courses for credit (Maxwell, online presentation for the NETP Technical Working Group, 2009).

Equally important to the OER movement was the emergence of the Creative Commons, an organization that developed a set of easy-to-use licenses whereby individuals or institutions could maintain ownership of their creative products while giving others selected rights. These rights range from allowing use of a work in its existing form for noncommercial purposes to the right to repurpose, remix, and redistribute for any purpose…

The OER movement begun in higher education should be more fully adopted throughout our K-16 public education system. For example, high-quality digital textbooks for standard courses such as algebra can be created by experts and funded by consortia arrangements and then made freely available as a public good. Open textbooks could significantly reduce the cost of education in primary and secondary as well as higher education. Textbooks constitute a significant portion of the government’s K-12 budget as well as the student-borne cost of higher education.

To download the NETP, click here. Thanks to Creative Commons for bringing our attention to this important news. To start browsing the Curriki K-12 OER collection, click here.

Between the NETP and the Horizon Report, looks like 2010 might just be the year of OER!

@Curriki

www.Curriki.org

• Do you participate in regular PD?
• What PD topics are of interest to you?
• Do you prefer online or face-to-face PD?
• What makes a great trainer/professional developer?
• Would you be interested in participating in a Curriki Institute to make the most of Curriki content and tools?

To participate in our 5 minute survey, click here. To see responses from past Curriki surveys on topics such as smart boards, national standards, and more, click here.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about PD!

@Curriki

www.Curriki.org

The above image is by Olivander and is made available under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

In celebration of Music in Our Schools Month, click on over to the Listen for Life “Travels with Music” collection on Curriki.

Listen for Life (LFL) is a global family of music listeners, performers, teachers, producers, and sociologists — all working together to preserve, encourage, and develop music cultures worldwide. LFL strives to make music a language of cross-cultural communication and thus promote diversity and understanding towards a path of peace. Travels with Music is a program produced by LFL that uses video profiles of master musicians from various traditions to introduce and to celebrate the cultures that the musicians represent.

Take a virtual fieldtrip to Senegal by grooving to the beats of master drummer Aziz Faye. Learn about the Javanese gamelan and Philippine kulintang via a click to Southeast Asia. Teach your students about the music of China, Bulgaria, South America and more!

Thanks to a generous grant from the Hearst Foundation, educators can now access free professional development on Curriki that teaches them to effectively make the most of OERs in their classroom.

Created by six distinguished professors from around the United States (Brett Shelton, David Wiley, Cynthia Gautreau, Chris Penny, Dave Fontaine, Michael Searson), the course is composed of the following units:

• Chapter 1 – Introduction: Getting Started with OER
• Chapter 2 – Licensing: Knowing Your Rights
• Chapter 3 – Find/Search: Making the Internet Your Best Friend
• Chapter 4 – Create: Contributing Your Best Material
• Chapter 5 – Use: Integrating OER into Your Classroom
• Chapter 6 – Remix/Reuse: Making it Your Own

To get started with the course, click here. To learn more about the course, the professors behind the course, and how it was put together, visit “Integrating Open Education Resources in the Classroom”.

We welcome you to share this course with any teacher interested in using the Internet to find and teach high quality free and open content!

Happy OER Friday!

@Curriki

www.Curriki.org

As of January 1, 2010, all resources on Curriki can now be aligned to state standards for the four core subjects and technology for all 50 of the United States plus Washington, D.C. To see what a standards-aligned resource looks like, check out these units on Curriki:

• The Kite Runner by educator Jemma Lloyd-Helliker
• Writing and Comparing Whole Numbers and Decimals by educator Naomi Rodriguez
• A Tour of the Universe by educator Meredith Beaton

To browse Curriki resources by state standards, visit our Browse by Standards page. To start aligning your favorite existing Curriki content to your state standards, click here.

Once you’ve aligned a piece of content, let the Curriki team know! Send us a tweet @Curriki or a line on Facebook and we will broadcast your standards-aligned content to the world!

To leaping!

@Curriki

www.Curriki.org

P.S. We’d love to hear your thoughts about our state standards alignment tool. Comments are welcome here.

This was a classic “chicken and egg” scenario.  If the repository did not have sufficient content with broad coverage, then the community would not come to the site or come back to the site.  And if there did not exist an active and growing community, then the number of learning resources in the repository would be insufficient to engage the members. Curriki has been able to address this problem by determining that our site needed to support our community and the content needed to be easy to use and to edit.

The Curriki community is growing rapidly due to effective use of social networking tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogging.  While we support and promote the viral growth of the repository, we have supplemented our content acquisition with partner content and small subsidies for community members to build content. Curriki today is one of the most active OER sites due to a very carefully balanced “give and take” between community and content.

I believe Curriki is becoming an effective social learning platform – one that is driven by and improved by the community; and simultaneously includes effective tools for making curriculum decisions based on reliable social networking data, expert reviews and standards.

Curriki would not be what it is today without the talent, dedication, and commitment from everyone who has worked with Curriki and has joined the Curriki community.  It is a time for Curriki to grow by working to further engage the open education community to participate, while keeping Curriki at the front of the movement.

I will be leaving my position as Executive Director of Curriki on March 1^st, but I will not be leaving the community and I promise the community that:

• I will actively engage in the social learning network that Curriki is so successfully building.
• I will continue to work with the OER movement to insure it sustainability and to make sure we can harness the power of this amazing disruptive change.
• I will work on improving teacher effectiveness and student performance by working to engage teachers in open and shared curriculum development.
• I will work to make sure that Curriki continues to eliminate the education divide.

I’d like to thank the many people that have grown Curriki to what it is today, and positioned it for its next chapter. Without the commitment of the dedicated Curriki staff, our content and technology partners, our funders and our active and growing Curriki membership around the world, truly none of this would be possible.

Bobbi Kurshan

bkurshan@gmail.com

At the heart of the presentation was a discussion about how OERs such as Curriki can be used as a platform for 1) accessing engaging multimedia student resources, 2) teacher professional development, and 3) the creation of localized Arabic-language curricula—a huge need in the region (see UAE National article, “Arabic move to put lesson plans within UAE teachers reach”).

At the end of the talk we looked at two case studies about how Curriki is currently being used at the Casablanca American School in Morocco and at the Zayed University teacher education program in the UAE and discussed recommendations for schools and policymakers in the region.

For those that are interested in reading more about the case for OERs within the context of the Middle East, I welcome you to read the paper below. Feedback, stories, comments, questions, and ideas are welcome!

From an OER fan in the UAE,

Anna Batchelder

www.Curriki.org

We are using Curriki in San José Unified School District to maximize the impact of individual teachers’ lessons, ideas, and teaching resources. Curriki has been a wonderful partner in these efforts and we look forward to expanding our program with them next year to continue enhancing teaching and learning across our district.

- Felicia Webb, Instructional Technology Resource Teacher, CA

1) How did you originally hear about Curriki?

I am one of two Instructional Technology Resource Teachers for our district.  My primary responsibility is to provide technology professional development opportunities for teachers in SJUSD.  I coordinate our Technology Leadership programs, our district-wide technology classes program, and school-site technology professional development program.  I also teach many of the professional development workshops that we offer.

I heard about Curriki from our district Assistant Superintendent Bill Erlendson. After visiting the site, I thought Curriki would be a meaningful collaboration tool and online environment for the development and sharing of teaching resources and materials across our district.

2) How is Curriki being used in your school district?

During the Spring of 2009 we participated in a Curriki pilot in which 46 Technology Leadership teachers from 19 sites in San Jose Unified School District were trained to access and add content to the San Jose Unified Technology Leadership Forum group on Curriki.  From March through May, these teachers uploaded completed Units of Practice into the Curriki group, used Curriki group features, and explored each other’s submissions.

After the pilot, many of the participants reported that Curriki was a useful tool for online collaborations organized by grade and subject. Therefore, this year we are using Curriki with an expanded group of teachers to share resources and collaborate with one another. As of January 1, 2010 our teachers have contributed over 430 resources to Curriki!

3) Given your experience using Curriki with teachers in your district, do you have any advice for districts that wish to use Curriki?

Curriki groups are great for collaboratively building learning resources. Here are a few tips for making Curriki groups a success within your school/district:

• Size—Keep groups small (10-12 members).
• Theme—Organize groups by common interests or goals.
• Time—Allocate time or compensation for collaboration, development, and posting of lessons and teaching resources.
• Expectations—Group members should agree on expectations for what they will do with their group in advance (e.g., post one individual lesson per grading period, develop one group lesson per semester).
• Leadership—Each group should have a leader that keeps the group on track, encourages group collaborations, etc. This person should be a teacher leader, administrator, or curricula expert within the district.

4) Is there anything else you’d like to share with the Curriki community?

Our 2009 Curriki Pilot with our Technology Leadership groups helped us determine the direction we wish to go with Curriki in San José Unified.  As we begin 2010, we are creating a District-wide Curriki group for the purpose of collecting and collaborating on teaching and learning resources.  Our goal is to eventually have our entire district repository of teaching and learning resources in our Curriki group.  We look forward to the enhanced availability of resources and the easy, on demand, online access that Curriki provides, as well as the vast possibilities.  As we move forward in our efforts, Curriki will be an invaluable partner!

To download this story and to read other stories from Curriki members around the world, visit the Curriki Stories homepage.

If you would like to share your own Curriki story, we welcome you to post a comment on this blog post and/or to contact us @Curriki on Twitter!

The speech not only helped to galvanize the already growing civil-rights movement across the country at the time, it also became one of the most influential and inspirational pieces of rhetoric in American history.

Remarkably, midway through his delivery, King suspended his pre-scripted text and began to improvise; what resulted was the speech’s most recognizable section, the passage in which the words “I have a dream” are passionately repeated…

In celebration Black History Month, check out, “I have a dream as a work of literature”. In this lesson, students will study the rhetorical influences on King’s speech, the oratorical devices that King used, and how his speech compares to other famous speeches and literary forms.

Happy Black History Month!

@Curriki

http://www.Curriki.org

P.S. Thanks to PBS NewsHour for contributing this wonderful lesson to Curriki. To see other NewsHour lessons on topics ranging from the economy to poetry to healthcare, click here.

Note: The above image can be found here and is available under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.