http://
www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/SMART-created lesson activities now accessible through Curriki website
Educators can find 100 SMART-created lesson activities via global
open-source learning community
CALGARY, Alberta --- January 24, 2008 --- SMART Technologies announces the addition of 100 SMART-created lesson activities to Curriki: The Global Education & Learning Community, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing free education materials. These interactive lesson activities for Notebook collaborative learning software are designed for K12 teachers. The activities include embedded Adobe(R), Flash(R), multimedia files as well as colorful and descriptive graphics. Each one is designed to encourage interactivity in the classroom. Curriki's use of open-source content allows users to comment, edit and group together curricular materials to create a lesson. Teachers can adapt or revise lesson plans to suit their students' needs.
The lesson activities from SMART are cross-curricular and cover subjects such as biology, chemistry, English, geography, history, language arts, math, science and social studies. All lesson activities are developed with, or correlated to, state curriculum standards in the United States and provincial curriculum standards in Canada. Curriki has also joined the SMART Software Accreditation Program at the Ready level, the basic accreditation level for a software or content offering. The lesson activities on the Curriki website include interactive title bars about each lesson, title pages and lesson notes for teachers. The activities are versatile they can be used within the original lesson plan or moved to Notebook software's Gallery or to another lesson activity.
"We are excited to have SMART join our growing group of publishers who are sharing their high-quality content with our global open-source community," says Dr. Barbara Kurshan, Curriki's executive director. "By adding this collection of 100 lesson activities for Notebook software, we are continuing to build the first and only Internet site with a complete course of open-source instruction and assessment for K12."
"SMART-created lesson activities provide educators with easy-to-use, highly interactive instructional resources," says Nancy Knowlton, SMART's CEO. "SMART and Curriki have together made these world-class digital resources more accessible, so any educator anywhere can benefit from them."
About Notebook software lesson activities
Created by educators for educators, SMART's lesson activities are 5 to 15 minutes in length and are correlated to local curriculum standards. The latest collection uses the creative power of Notebook collaborative learning software to enhance lessons with Adobe Flash activities, multimedia files and graphics. Teachers can find lesson activities to help them teach a wide variety of subjects, including language arts, math, science and social studies. The lesson activities run in Notebook software and can also be viewed in Notebook interactive viewer for free.
About Curriki: The Global Education & Learning CommunityCurriki: The Global Education & Learning Community is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving education by empowering teachers, students and parents with universal access to free and open-source curricula. Curriki is building the first and only Internet site that offers a complete course of open-source instruction and assessment for K12. The organization is creating a world-class educational environment that is community developed and supported. Founded by Sun Microsystems in 2004, Curriki now operates as an independent nonprofit.
For more information, contact
SMART Technologies
Public Relations
Phone +1.403.802.2595
pr@smarttech.com
SMART-created lesson activities now accessible through Curriki website
Educators can find 100 SMART-created lesson activities via global
open-source learning community
CALGARY, Alberta --- January 24, 2008 --- SMART Technologies announces the addition of 100 SMART-created lesson activities to Curriki: The Global Education & Learning Community, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing free education materials. These interactive lesson activities for Notebook collaborative learning software are designed for K12 teachers. The activities include embedded Adobe(R), Flash(R), multimedia files as well as colorful and descriptive graphics. Each one is designed to encourage interactivity in the classroom. Curriki's use of open-source content allows users to comment, edit and group together curricular materials to create a lesson. Teachers can adapt or revise lesson plans to suit their students' needs.
The lesson activities from SMART are cross-curricular and cover subjects such as biology, chemistry, English, geography, history, language arts, math, science and social studies. All lesson activities are developed with, or correlated to, state curriculum standards in the United States and provincial curriculum standards in Canada. Curriki has also joined the SMART Software Accreditation Program at the Ready level, the basic accreditation level for a software or content offering. The lesson activities on the Curriki website include interactive title bars about each lesson, title pages and lesson notes for teachers. The activities are versatile they can be used within the original lesson plan or moved to Notebook software's Gallery or to another lesson activity.
"We are excited to have SMART join our growing group of publishers who are sharing their high-quality content with our global open-source community," says Dr. Barbara Kurshan, Curriki's executive director. "By adding this collection of 100 lesson activities for Notebook software, we are continuing to build the first and only Internet site with a complete course of open-source instruction and assessment for K12."
"SMART-created lesson activities provide educators with easy-to-use, highly interactive instructional resources," says Nancy Knowlton, SMART's CEO. "SMART and Curriki have together made these world-class digital resources more accessible, so any educator anywhere can benefit from them."
About Notebook software lesson activities
Created by educators for educators, SMART's lesson activities are 5 to 15 minutes in length and are correlated to local curriculum standards. The latest collection uses the creative power of Notebook collaborative learning software to enhance lessons with Adobe Flash activities, multimedia files and graphics. Teachers can find lesson activities to help them teach a wide variety of subjects, including language arts, math, science and social studies. The lesson activities run in Notebook software and can also be viewed in Notebook interactive viewer for free.
About Curriki: The Global Education & Learning Community
Curriki: The Global Education & Learning Community is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving education by empowering teachers, students and parents with universal access to free and open-source curricula. Curriki is building the first and only Internet site that offers a complete course of open-source instruction and assessment for K12. The organization is creating a world-class educational environment that is community developed and supported. Founded by Sun Microsystems in 2004, Curriki now operates as an independent nonprofit.
For more information, contact
SMART Technologies
Public Relations
Phone +1.403.802.2595
pr@smarttech.com
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28 November 2007
About CurrikiCurriki is the year-old "Wikipedia of curriculum" and brainchild of Scott McNealy, the chairman of Sun. McNealy and another Sun co-founder, Andreas Bechtolsheim, have put some of their personal fortunes into getting Curriki off the ground.
"It just seemed to me," McNealy said during a recent interview in Paris, "why are we open-sourcing browsers and spreadsheets and operating systems, when we ought to be open-sourcing third-grade math textbooks?"
Noting that the annual U.S. spending on textbooks is more than $4 billion, McNealy said, "Are you kidding me? Nothing's changed since Newton got hit on the head with an apple. Why can't we get that as close to zero as possible and put that back into paying teachers? And why can't we do that internationally?"
His oversimplified and rhetorical questions are in the process of being answered. While Curriki has attracted 35,000 members and has started experimental partnerships with government education offices in India, South Korea, Britain, Canada and elsewhere, it has not signed up any of the world's major textbook publishers.
But Curriki hopes soon to announce a partnership with Sesame Workshop for lesson-plan content related to its new Panwapa line of Muppet characters. Barbara Kurshan, Curriki's Washington-based executive director, said she believes the deal would be a "major coup" toward the goal of attracting mainstream academic publishers because of the high-profile Sesame name.
The group is also in talks with a major non-U.S. publisher she would not name about contributing science-class content to Curriki in a test to see "how open-source can improve their products," Kurshan said.
And it has struck a content-sharing agreement with Cambridge University Press's subscription-based Web site for copyright-cleared educational material, called the Global Grid for Learning.
Publishers, she said, can gain from sharing proprietary information in a few ways. On Curriki, they get access to a community of educators who could be future textbook writers for them. They can also get their content out to different geographic markets they would not ordinarily reach.
And the "open-source" feature of Curriki does not prevent the information from being commercialized, Kurshan noted. It just requires continued sharing of the content, according to the fine print of open-source licenses.
In the meantime, educators around the world, often isolated from the latest cutting-edge thinking on their profession, can find lesson plans and entire subject or grade curriculums free for the taking on Curriki.
They can also use its online tools, built by Sun and a French open-source company called XWiki, to share resources with others, write a textbook or build a curriculum out of content available on the site, which is so far available in English and Hindi.
In an effort to enhance its credibility, the group recently joined with AARP, formerly the American Association for Retired Persons, to draft former teachers and other "subject experts" to evaluate the curriculums that get posted. The volunteered content also goes through two initial levels of screening within Curriki itself.
But it is slow going. Not even the Wikimedia Foundation's own online "university" has gotten the same kind of traction as Wikipedia, which gets 47 million monthly visitors.
"I think that's because of how much governance has to overlay what we're doing - how do you get certification, how do you get teachers to say it's O.K. to use it, how do you review it," Kurshan said. "We don't have the luxury of putting out a bad fact and waiting 20 minutes until somebody corrects it."
The nonprofit group, which has an annual budget of about $2 million, said it hoped to use the Internet itself as its marketing plan.
"Teachers and parents and students are really good at finding things that make it easier for them teach or quicker for them to learn something," Kurshan said.
To speed that viral marketing, developers are working on an application that would let members of a social network, like Facebook, stay within the site yet still publish content to Curriki.
They also are coming up with a "Curriki Light" to be used in the XO, the computer being produced for the developing world by Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project, as well as for Intel's Classmate project.
Even without the commitment of textbook publishers, Curriki is getting some recognition. Kurshan plans to come to Paris next month to receive an award from Unesco for Curriki.org's global efforts.
"It's actually getting more international attention," McNealy said, "because the U.S. can afford $4.3 billion. India can't. China can't. Actually, the farther we get away from the U.S., the more exciting this becomes."
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UNESCO awards 2007 King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize to CurrikiA Web Site That Offers Global Collaboration on Educational Resources
A Web site that provides free access to school curricula developed through collaboration by a community of educators has won a prestigious international award.
Curriki: The Global Education and Learning Community recently was named a winner of the 2007 King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize, sharing the honor with the Claroline Project, which is based in Belgium at the Université Catholique. They were selected on the recommendation of an international jury by the director-general of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, who will present $25,000 to each of the two laureates in a ceremony at UNESCO headquarters on December 19.
Curriki, originally founded in 2004 by Sun Microsystems as the Global Education & Learning Community, is different from other e-learning sites in that it focuses on complete curricula and not just a textbook or lesson plans, and provides easy-to-use tools for creating curriculum packets out of content available on the site.
“Curriki is a kind of Wikipedia of education curriculum,” Executive Director Barbara Kurshan told USINFO. Wikipedia is the multilingual online encyclopedia that has been built collaboratively.
In 2006, Curriki became an independent nonprofit organization under its current name in response to a need expressed by many ministers of education around the world for cost-effective, universally accessible curricula.
The 10,000 learning resources available on Curriki are used regularly by 35,000 people, Kurshan said. Current offerings range from lesson plans, assessments and media clips to complete textbooks, all available at no cost.
When community members view the resource pages, they are able to comment, edit and group content to create a lesson, course or curriculum.
When Kurshan visited Ethiopia recently, the minister of education told her the biggest problem he faces is not staffing the country’s 13 new universities but meeting the need for educational materials. That is precisely what Curriki and the open-source community can do, Kurshan said.
“With the advent of the Internet, we now have a unique opportunity to change the curricula paradigm, and thereby to dramatically expand access to quality learning while reducing the cost,” she said.
The Curriki Web site is available in English, but educators can post materials in any language. The Web site soon will be available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Hindi.
A WORLDWIDE DIGITAL PLATFORM
Curriki hopes to join forces with the $100 laptop project launched in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Nicholas Negroponte. Curriki is involved in discussions to ensure that as much of its material as possible will be accessible on the laptops.
“One of the largest problems is that kids don’t have access to textbooks, they don’t have access to libraries, they don’t have access to information; and teachers don’t have materials to teach in their classroom,” Kushan said. “Books are too expensive and they don’t get distributed and they don’t have a capacity for instructional design.” Curriki provides a digital “platform and a community for people worldwide to share,” she said.
The AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, recently announced it would be partnering with Curriki and will encourage its more than 1 million retired educators to vet and screen submissions for accuracy and appropriateness for educational application.
Curriki’s initial focus is on kindergarten through grade 12 curricula in the areas of mathematics, science, technology, reading and language arts, and languages.
Educators can use Curriki’s online tools to share resources with others or to write a textbook or build a curriculum. Starting early in 2008, the textbook template and work group tools will enable groups of educators to use a curriculum framework to build a book map, or sections or pages of an instructional textbook. The Currikulum Builder enables users to select individual lesson plans, course syllabi, learning activities, scope and sequence hierarchies and other educational elements found at www.curriki.org to build a complete, fully-integrated curriculum.
Curriki intends to do research on its impact. “We believe strongly in research,” Kurshan said. “We have to show it works” to convince governments, teachers and school districts to use it.
“The instructional design process historically -- not just in the United States but worldwide -- has been very top down,” she said. “Ministries of education say, ‘Here’s the curriculum, here’s the objectives, and here’s the pedagogy we want you to teach it with.’ We don’t know what’s going to happen when you collaboratively build curriculum. To me that’s what’s exciting about Curriki.”
“We’re upsetting the cart in a lot of ways,” Kurshan said.
Additional information about the educational resources and the open source educational community is available on the Curriki Web site.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
