Category Archives: Curriculum Resources

Free curriculum by 2040

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Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) is doing a guest stint at lessig blog while Lawrence Lessig is away. He’s making a top ten list of things that will be free someday and puts a free curriculum on the list at #2.

I’m not sure why there would be just one free curriculum. It’s not like teachers do all their curriculum shopping in one place anyway. Rather than a master repository somewhere, it seems much more likely that teachers will continue to look all around for the best materials available. Making it easier to find those materials sounds like a worthy goal to me.

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Wikipedia for language learners

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I was driving home from work today listening to an IT Conversations podcast of Jimmy Wales’s brief talk at O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech Conference. Wales, who is the founder of Wikipedia and now head of the Wikimedia Foundation, was describing the growth of Wikipedia and highlighting the many versions that exist in languages from around the world. At that moment it occurred to me that the non-English versions of Wikipedia could be a fantastic tool for the foreign language teachers in my school district. Wouldn’t it be cool for Spanish students to contribute to the Spanish version of Wikipedia? That sounds like an authentic learning experience to me. Why didn’t I think of this before?

Creative Commons presentation

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We had a brief presentation by Neeru Paharia from the Creative Commons organization tonight. She had a video explaining the history of Creative Commons and went on to talk about some specific Web resources to help users find Creative Commons-licensed content. Her suggestions:

She also highlighted two Creative Commons tools. The first, ccPublisher, helps users tag content with the proper Creative Commons license and then uploads the content to the Internet Archive. The second, ccMixter, is a tool to build a music sharing site that can be linked to other ccMixter sites on the Internet. She talked about the potential for building a ccMixter for teacher lesson plans.

I haven’t mentioned this yet in my musing about developing our curriculum sharing tool, but I plan to lobby our district administration to license all of the curriculum materials with a Creative Commons license by default. Shouldn’t sharing be the default anyway?

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Leaning toward Plone and GEM

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I started installing Plone on a test server last week at work. If all goes well, the combination of Plone and some cataloging technology created by the folks at the Gateway for Education Materials (GEM) will form the foundation for the curriculum sharing tool that I’ve posted about recently. We’re at the beginning of this project, but I remain confident that these technologies will help us deliver a tool that gets use by our teachers.

My understanding of the GEM technology at this point is that it’s purely for cataloging. That is, you don’t actually store the content in the GEM system, just metadata that describe the content. The default metadata include items related to subject area, grade level, and keywords among others. I am going to need to extend the existing metadata options to include some specific items that we need to index in order to customize the system to fit the Hopkins curriculum. One example is a link to the Hopkins Instructional Technology Standards for each lesson or resource.

Marking up the curriculum materials that our teachers create is a big issue too. Our search tool can point to any URL to find the actual content, but I need to figure out how best to put that content online. Valid XHTML and CSS are a no-brainer, but I’m not yet sure how much other info I need to include. Take the list of authors, for example. Would this do:

<ul>
 <li>Tim Wilson</li>
 <li>Sally Jones</li>
</ul>

or would I need something more “semantic” to make this work well:

<ul id="authorlist">
 <li>Tim Wilson</li>
 <li>Sally Jones</li>
</ul>

And maybe the curriculum materials should be stored in a database anyway, even though the search tool will simply point to a URL. A database will have to be part of the solution anyway in order to make the notification component of this system work. We’re going to have to have a database with every teacher’s name, the grades or courses that they teach, and an estimate of when the Hopkins curriculum units get taught every year.

I will gladly entertain suggestions from anyone about this stuff. This is nearly uncharted territory for me.

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BrainPOP for next year

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One of the software purchases I made for next year was a BrainPOP subscription for all of the district’s 3rd-6th graders. I had a number of our teachers in the one-to-one computing project work with it on a trial basis and they raved about how much the kids enjoyed the BrainPOP content. They’ve got movies and quizzes in science, social studies, math, English, health, and technology topics. One tiny little feature that I appreciate is that they allow “deep linking” to specific movies. That allows the teacher to link directly to a particular movie and avoid potential confusion as young students try to navigate through the various categories. Take this movie about MP3s, for example.

One tip: I wouldn’t bother buying a subscription for your K-2 students. I haven’t found much content appropriate for kids that age. If you ask, the BrainPOP folks will sell you a subscription that doesn’t include that group and you’ll save some money.

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Geocaching comes to the classroom

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I just finished a session called “Geocaching in Your Classroom” by Monte Gaukler, a Middle School Curriculum Technology Partner from Grand Forks. The group had a great time talking about how geocaching could find uses in a variety of subjects across a K-12 school district. Need to know a bit more about geocaching itself? Try the FAQ.

We used Garmen eTrex GPS units for our little adventure today. It looks like they can be had for about $100 each. The precision was not too bad (within 20 feet or so), but my Magellan does do a bit better. That said, I still think I’d go with the Garmin in a school setting where easy of use and low cost are more important factors.

Here’s a very short list of ideas for using geocaching and GPS in your classroom (these aren’t all mine):

  • To train your students to use their GPS receivers, give half of the class golf balls and have the kids hide them around the school grounds. After they set a “waypoint” at the location of the golf ball, the students return and give the GPS receiver to another student who uses it to go find the ball.
  • A P.E. teacher could create some caches and send students to go track them down. Instant exercise!
  • There are a lot of science applications. Students could do all sorts of water quality and other environmental studies and integrate their results with GIS. (Assuming you’ve got some good GIS software.)
  • The use of GPS for teaching about geography and math related to latitude and longitude are pretty obvious. It makes the whole discussion a lot more concrete when kids can walk outside and see their latitude and longitude in real time. (Make sure you talk about Dava Sobel’s book Longitude.)
  • This one’s a little more involved, but wouldn’t it be cool if some students used travel bugs to track the points on a map and learn about the local geography of the areas where the travel bugs go?

Craig reminded me of the Degree Confluence Project, an effort to “visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location.” Hurry, there are only 12,240 left to be found and photographed! It doesn’t take long to thoroughly boggle your mind when you stop and consider the way that GPS technology has rippled throughout our economy and culture.

Building the perfect curriculum sharing tool

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Here is a list of the features I want/need in whatever curriculum sharing tool with use:

  • Web-based utilizing standards-compliant, semantic markup
  • Searchable
  • Extensive use of RSS to allow teachers to subscribe to various grade levels or subjects
  • Ability to link to state and national standards as well as whatever local standards we’d like to include
  • Comments enabled on lesson so teachers can leave additional information about how the materials worked for them or suggestions for improvements
  • Hooks to plug into whatever intranet portal technology we choose

Is that so much to ask?

This tool has to get used. Creating yet another Web site that goes unvisited is unacceptable. To that end I think it’s crucial that the system support not only browsing and searching for materials, but notifications too. We know our curriculum, we know when it’s taught, and we know who teaches it. Wouldn’t it be cool if the system could send an email like this:

Dear Tim,

You must be thinking about your upcoming unit on the water cycle
right about now. Perhaps you'd be interested in one of the following
lesson plans that have been posted since the last time you taught
this unit.

At the end of the message would be a list of hyperlinks to complete lessons available in the system including rubrics, printable instruction sheets, and whatever else is necessary to teach the lesson. I think a system like this would get used a lot.

Introducing Creative Commons

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It’s clear that some people don’t quite get Creative Commons yet. See Lawrence Lessig’s recent post about an article in Billboard magazine for proof that there’s more education to be done. (Assuming that the misunderstanding is an honest one and not motivated by blind allegiance to the RIAA.)

Creative Commons AU has produced a short animated video [link, 13.3 MB] that captures the essentials of Creative Commons licensing. Maybe you or someone you know could benefit from getting a better sense of how Creative Commons works and how it can be used to promote sharing and collaboration.