Tag: Curriculum Catalyst

4 Crowd Sourced Topic Ideas

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So far The Curriculum Catalyst has explored 4 different topics, it is all about crowd-sourcing curriculum ideas (recorded in a simple way) that can be developed further into curriculum planning.

Here are the 4 topics so far and a selection of highlights. Make sure you follow the links to the actual documents to see the full extent of the ideas.

Endangered

Tag >> #endangeredcurr

  • IT checking sources, can you believe what you read online: Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/
  • Discursive writing – role of zoos in helping save endangered species – is this a good thing?
  • Literacy/IT – what does endangered mean? children brain storm what they think is endangered in the world – not just animals – what about languages? e.g local languages in this country.
  • Non Native Species – do these endanger native species ? Are they useful to control endangered species ? Animals such as Beaver and Boar were originally native to the UK, should they be re-introduced ? Can the current eco-system sustain them?

Survival

Tag >> #survivalcurr

  • Survival Exercises – A variety of tasks based around choices in a survival scenario. I’ve personally used the NASA and the ‘lost at sea’ one with year 7, and the ‘who would you save’ with year 12 –http://wilderdom.com/games/descriptions/SurvivalScenarios.html
  • Rescue Services – find out about the variety of different emergency services that often work in collaboration in any given situation – there are some excellent first hand images here http://globalrescueservices.org.uk/index.htm
  • Making animals – Design an animal which would survive in e.g. Desert link directly to work on adaptation in science. Could take theme down fantasy route, linking with Imaginary Creatures Curriculum Catalyst http://bit.ly/bDKP30
  • Saltwater – Water, water, everywhere but not a drop to drink! You are surrounded by saltwater on your island. Your challenge is to find a way of making drinking water. Provide children with a range of items they could use to invent a contraption. Model the science involved. Science SC1 (i.e. create a contraption to gather steam when the salt water is boiled).

Sealife

Tag >> #sealifecurr

  • Choose your most amazing Ocean Road Adventure. There are many famous Ocean Road journey  around the world – for example, The Great Ocean Road in SE Australia or the roads along the coasts of California and Norway.  Choose some of these famous routes to investigate, compare features, find-out what people think about them.  Try typing `Ocena Road Journey’ into your favourite search engine.  Vote on your favourite – the one you’d most like to experience (say why).
  • `Little fishes swim along’ Steve Grocott has produced a fantastic set of action rhymes on a CD.  My grandson loves this one (we sing it while watching a slideshow on Flickr or Picasa) – we took the song to India with us when we went on an educational visit and the children their loved it too.  http://bit.ly/aweCmu
  • Make your own ‘Aquarium’ from boxes, write labels for the fish you put in, a map for visitors, a leaflet to get people to visit, a quiz for people to do as they go round, a cafe and a gift shop…
  • Comparison – whale sharks are the largest of all sharks but live off of a diet of small fish and plankton.  To help students appreciate the largeness of this shark and the smallness of its food, on blacktop draw a 12 meter line with chalk.  Have students sit on the line and draw a whale shark outline around them.  Finish with small “fish” and “plankton” around the outline.

Imaginary Creatures

Tag >> #imagcreaturescurr

  • Spore 2D http://www.spore2d.com/ (Based on a Nintendo DS game, lets you create creatures online)
  • Fantasy Stories in Y1 – explore imaginary creatures and monsters using The Gruffalo,  Where the Wild Things Are and Moshi Monsters (adopt a monster online).  These stimuli can also be used to compare fanstasy settings for imaginary creatures.  Children then create their own “monster” (paint and add different textured materials such as leather, fur, etc.).  They describe their monster and then finally write a story about meeting their monster using Where the Wild Things Are as a model.
  • Monsters Inc. – A combined Art/ICT project. The idea of animation is discussed with reference to Pixars ‘Monsters Inc.’ Children design a character and storyboard their short (silent or scripted) story, they then use plasticine to create their own monster and props. A visualizer/web cam/digital camera is then used along with stop motion software (I Can Animate or Monkey Jam) to capture the animation.
  • Build Your Wild Self – Get students to use this site to create a human mix animal creature, you could also draw them. Print them out and get your students to write character descriptions of their Wild Self.

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I am sure that you will find some great ideas from the work of all the great educators who have contributed an idea or two. It seems to me that the need for grass roots, crowd sourced resources for curriculum design has never been greater – and which will only become even more heightened.

I hope that the documents prove useful, if you feel like contributing the documents are all open to edit. Make sure you look out for the next topic soon to be catalysed, if we all make a small contribution we can produce great things.

The Curriculum Catalyst – Stage 2 – Contribute Your Ideas

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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.

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.