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Curriki – A Living Curricula Repository for Our School |
"I like that we are able to keep a virtual copy of all of our lesson plans and to access other teachers' plans in order to help with our teaching… I think that being able to access others' lesson plans will help us to work closely within our grades and across the grades." |
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| Antoinette Dendtler, Ed. M. ECO (Environment, Community, Opportunity) Charter School Camden, New Jersey, USA Founder & Head of School |
2) How does the ECO Charter School use Curriki?
We use Curriki to create a living repository of ECO’s curricula. With Curriki, ECO teachers and administrators are able to:
- Privately share curricula and planning documents via our group on Curriki.
- Access ECO curricula from present and past school years.
- Continually extend and develop our curricula as individuals and as a team using Curriki’s lesson plan templates and revision tools.
- Get feedback on our curricula from Curriki subject expert reviewers and the Curriki global community.
- Present our curricula to interested parents and school stakeholders.
- Connect and collaborate with other schools and educational organizations who share a strong interest in environmental education.
3) What is your process for ensuring that all ECO teachers know how to use Curriki? Curriki is quite user friendly. That said, when my school first started using Curriki in 2008, I requested a Curriki professional development (PD) expert to attend ECO’s Faculty Academy in August. She ran a half-day PD session for our teachers so that during the school year every teacher would be able to upload a weekly lesson into the correct grade/subject folder within our Curriki group. I requested a follow-up PD session in November of 2008 to reinforce teacher usage and throughout the year we scheduled regular phone sessions with her as we implemented a new school-wide curricula review process.
4) What do the teachers in your school think about Curriki? I surveyed a few of our teachers about Curriki. Here is what they said:
- "The Curriki site is used to post lesson plans and offer teachers a resource to find ideas for planning. It's a great way to link grades and gain insight about what teachers are doing in other classrooms" (Kate Goodman, First Grade Language Arts/Literacy/Social Studies Teacher).
- "We are able to view the lesson plans of other grades and see what is going on in our school and use the ideas of our colleagues" (Tiffany Ballard, Third Grade Language Arts/Literacy/Social Studies Teacher).
- "I think Curriki is very user friendly… The purpose of the website is for teachers to have the opportunity to share ideas regarding curriculum and planning. The site has many resources available for use. I think it’s beneficial for teachers all over to be able to share and collaborate. At ECO, it also allowed me to look over my colleagues plans to see if we could work together on topics" (Christina Miller, First Grade Science Teacher).
- "I like that we are able to keep a virtual copy of all of our lesson plans and are able to access other teachers' plans in order to help with our teaching… I think that being able to access others' lesson plans will help us to work closely within our grades and across the grades." (Diane Miller, Kindergarten Teacher)
5) How do you plan to use Curriki in the future? After a successful 2008 pilot, we continue to use Curriki for the 2009-2010 school year. This year instead of uploading a file attachment for each weekly lesson plan, teachers are embedding their lesson plans within the Curriki wiki using a custom template. We plan to release our curricula to the public in the spring of this year. So far our school has contributed over 1,700 resources to Curriki!
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