Tag: crowd-sourcing

The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 2 – Contribute Your Ideas

CurriculumPublished on4 Comments on The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 2 – Contribute Your Ideas

The Curriculum Catalyst is about the online education community coming together to produce practical resources that we can all use to support curriculum development.

At the end of last weekend the Catalyst had over 280 topic ideas for the curriculum and over 70 people had voted more that 3000 times for a top topic. It turned out to be SEALIFE and since then I have created an open Google Document to collate our ideas for the topic. (Stage 2)

The document already has over 50 crowd-sourced sealife ideas (thanks for your help so far) for teaching and learning including:

  • Subject specific lesson activities
  • Books to support the Sealife topic
  • Web based resources
  • Details of the Ocean layer in Google Earth
  • Nintendo Wii games that can be used
  • Possibilities for places to visit in the UK
  • DVD titles

I hope that it proves useful in sparking some ideas for you and your staff. Please consider adding a short idea to the document to continue developing it. Don’t forget to just explore the 280+ topic ideas themselves (and vote), maybe there is something there you haven’t thought of.

After a week, so this Sunday, I will repeat the process for the next highest voted topic and create a new ideas document to work on. Currently “Imaginary Creatures” is in the lead. All of the weekly docs will be linked from my blog’s Curriculum Catalyst page.

5 Fledgling “Interesting Ways” Presentations

Interesting WaysPublished on4 Comments on 5 Fledgling “Interesting Ways” Presentations

Currently there are close to 30 different presentations exploring Interesting Ways to use a whole variety of different types of technology in the classroom.

Here are a few of the most recent fledgling resources, please let me know if you would like to contribute by adding an idea.

Don’t forget to explore the rest of the Interesting Ways resources.

The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 1.5 – Which crowd-sourcing tool?

Curriculum, NetworksPublished on4 Comments on The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 1.5 – Which crowd-sourcing tool?

The Curriculum Catalyst has made a great start, it is only a few days old but 61 people have submitted 193 ideas and cast 1,896 votes. Thankyou to all of you who have helped so far.

Out of those 193 topic ideas will emerge one. For Stage 2 we will take that topic and crowd-source ideas, over the course of just a week, in a single space that will then be a resource for other teachers to use. After that is done we will turn our attention to voting for the next topic to develop and so on…

But which tool should we use to collaborate and gather our ideas?

The most important feature must be the ability to print a well formatted document. The printed page will have more influence, difficult as it might be to admit, to the vast majority of teachers. It can be copied and passed around, pinned on the notice board and shoved into pigeon holes.

Which tool will give us the crowd-sourcing freedom and access as well as the quality printed outcome?

I have been thinking this through and although Google Docs is terrible at printing, if the document is a straightforward heading /sub-heading / bullet list type of document it will export well to PDF and print well too. This will allow us the collaborative power of docs as well as the simple process of contributing a bullet point to a list.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas for tools that would fit perfectly for what we need for Stage 2? I would appreciate your help.

The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 1 – Add your ideas and votes

Curriculum, NetworksPublished onUpdated on19 Comments on The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 1 – Add your ideas and votes

It is clear from our collective efforts as an education community we can create some excellent resources. The “Interesting Ways” series has illustrated how single contributions to a collective can be extremely useful. This has been underlined by the “Maths Maps” too.

The “Interesting Ways” series has focused on single tools and how these can be implemented in different ways in the classroom. I think we can do the same for curriculum ideas around a single topic.

It is one thing seeing individual ideas in the above presentations or in blog posts from teachers who share them, but these are often less accessible to the majority of teachers than we think. They are either too tool-specific or in the case of reading ideas in blog posts they can be difficult to apply to the general classroom.

The Curriculum Catalyst is about crowd-sourcing topic ideas – creating a resource that can be printed off, yes printed, to form the basis for more detailed planning. With the English primary curriculum in a period of flux we are in a great position to push the creative agenda more and more – online networks allow us the opportunity to collaborate on a simple resource to support this.

Curriculum Catalyst
Stage 1 of this is about gathering topic ideas. Of course these can be ones that already exist that you have in fact already delivered. Perhaps it is a book or film, a subject topic or historical figure. They should not be fixed to an age group so the process is broadly applicable to as many classrooms as possible.

To contribute your ideas we will use Google Moderator which allows for a community to contribute and then vote on different items. Please have a look at The Curriculum Catalyst series over the next few weeks and “submit an idea” or vote for the ideas already contributed.

After a period of voting we will then take the top topic, Stage 2 will be about adding your ideas to support or engage learners within that topic. I don’t have any set ideas for which tool to use for Stage 2 and so would appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. Ideally anyone should be able to see the document and print off a copy in it’s present form.

I hope you can help with the first stage of this new project by contributing your ideas and votes. Crowd-sourcing education resources has become a genuinely valuable process. Our collective efforts should be able to generate some great curriculum ideas.