Digital OER Curricula You Can Use in Your K-5 Classroom TOMORROW!

Purpose & objective

COVID has taught us that learning at school and learning at home must be seamless! Deeply-digital, highly-interactive curricula can make learning independent of location. Supporting the use of deeply-digital curricula is the device-agnostic, browser-based, Collabrify Roadmap Platform. With funding from Lucas Educational Research, the UMich College of Engineering, and the Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation, the Platform has been developed and is maintained by the Center for Digital Curricula at the University of Michigan (College of Engineering). Since its initial rollout in 2019-2020, 10,000+ students, primarily in Michigan, have used the Platform and the year-long, deeply-digital, standards-aligned, free (OER) curricula for ELA, science, math and social studies that it hosts. Classrooms have reported increases in student achievement as measured by standardized tests (i-Ready, NWEA, etc.).

There are five major activities that a teacher must perform in a 1-to-1, digital curricula-based classroom: create an assignment, distribute that assignment (differentiating where necessary, and creating collaborative groups when appropriate), monitor the enactment of the lesson (moving between group work and whole class instruction, seamlessly), assess student artifacts, post-enactment (including the use of learning analytics collected during enactment), share Roadmaps with other educators.

The Platform supports teachers as they perform the above described five functions. And, the Platform supports students as they engage in the lessons hosted by the Platform. At the heart of the process is the Roadmap – a graphically formatted lesson. Structured like a concept map, each “node” in the Roadmap is a learning activity, e.g., develop a simulation, read a PDF, converse with an elbow partner, watch a video, count the number of squirrels in your backyard, create an animation, answer specific questions, etc. The Roadmap can contain any URL from the Internet. Importantly, a Roadmap doesn’t just contain learning objects (e.g., PDFs, videos), a Roadmap contains interactive learning activities, e.g., develop a simulation to represent an observed science process. Roadmap learning activities draw on a set of productivity tools that we developed expressly to support the younger, K-5 crowd: MediaWriter, Flipbook, Venn, PDFpal, KWL, Map, etc. All the tools are “collabrified” – they support students collaborating synchronously. (Students can work together in these tools even when they are not co-located! Students - and teachers - can use the "phone" function to talk through the computer to each other.)

At the end of our session, teachers will know how to (1) find already-made, high-quality, deeply-digital, standards-aligned curricula for K-5 for the 4 core subjects in the Michigan Digital Curricula Library, and, if desired, create differentiated/personalized/localized Roadmap lessons with multiple learning activities (e.g., reading/viewing multiple media, collaboratively constructing artifacts, etc.) that use OER (Open Education Resources) from OER marketplaces (creativecommons.org, ck12.org, GoOpenMichign.org, etc.); (2) distribute a Roadmap lesson with teacher-made collaborative workgroups; (3) monitor, in real-time, enactment of Roadmap lessons, giving video feedback as well as displaying and discussing the work of different student groups to the whole class using a projector, and tweaking collaborative workgroup membership in real-time due to absences, etc.; (4) and post-enactment, assess and provide feedback by easily visiting each student’s files as the files are all in one place; (5) use – or not – Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology with the Platform; (6) access, use, and share/contribute lesson Roadmaps from/to the Platform’s curricula library. Attendees will know how to apply the pedagogical practices that are needed in order to effectively use the deeply-digital, Roadmap lessons.

Outline

• Explain how the Collabrify Roadmap Platform and Roadmaps work & identify the benefits afforded by this unique, next-generation learning environment - 5 minutes
• Share example Roadmaps from various content areas and grade levels & describe the different ways educators are using Roadmaps in their classrooms - 5 minutes
• Share Roadmap Tutorial with participants to help them learn to navigate a Roadmap & work with tools in Collabrify -15 minutes
• Provide time for participants to create/modify a Roadmap - 25 minutes
• Reflect on next steps & share resources for continued support with Roadmaps - 10 minutes

Supporting research

Norris and Soloway conduct research into the role that digital curricula is playing in the digital transformation of K-12. In the OpEd Opinion article and in the following blog posts at the T.H.E. website, we describe a broad range of research that addresses the following topics: (1) the need for quality digital curricula, (2) the challenges involved in developing and deploying digital curricula, (3) and the kinds of impacts that are being observed due to the use of digital curricula.

Norris, C., Soloway, E, Tapp, A. (2022) Opinion: We've developed a digital education model that works, Detroit Free Press, June 5, 2022
https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2022/06/03/digital-education-platform-michigan-schools/7492216001/

Norris, C., Soloway (06/16/20) The Lesson of COVID-19: Learning at School and Learning at Home Must Be Seamless
https://thejournal.com/articles/2020/06/16/seamless.aspx

Norris, C. Soloway, E. (03/06/19) OER 3.0: K-12 Teachers in Michigan Are Creating and Using Deeply-Digital, OER Curricula,
https://thejournal.com/articles/2019/03/06/oer-3.0.aspx

Norris, C. Soloway, E. (10/01/18) 1-to-1, Blended Learning Enables Personalized Learning: Walk Through an Example Lesson.
https://thejournal.com/articles/2018/10/01/blended-learning.aspx

Norris, C. Soloway, E. (08/21/17) 1-to-1 Computers Demand 1-to-1 Curriculum: Good Luck Finding Any,
https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/08/21/good-luck-finding-any .aspx