Aditya Patel
Product Success Manager, Kiddom
Passionate about building great products that support excellent teaching and learning practices. Outside of the office, he loves to ski, hike, and wander the streets of a new city in hopes to find a great hole-in-the-wall restaurant.
This is the third installment of a three part series on responsive curriculum management success. You can view the other posts here:
- Academy’s Curriculum Development Tool is a Game Changer, Part 1
- How to Track Student Development with Responsive Curriculum Management, Part 2
- How to Build a School-wide Digital Literacy Curriculum, Part 3
Also related: Introducing Responsive Curriculum Management
If you peek into any classroom today, it is obvious that they’re drastically different than those of just 10 years ago. Devices are cheaper and readily available, and more schools are giving each student their own laptop.
The tools students use on this hardware is becoming more complex, allowing students and teachers to demonstrate and evaluate learning in new media formats. With all these new tools, schools are looking for ways to ensure that their students have the skills and knowledge to effectively communicate in different ways in the modern world.
I noticed that my students struggled to perform basic functions on computers, debunking my hypothesis that they already had mastered most skills.
When I started teaching high school algebra in Newark, NJ, technology was still relatively new to our school. We rolled out laptop carts on every floor and I quickly saw this opportunity to implement Khan Academy’s digital practices in my classroom. However, I noticed that my students struggled to perform basic functions on computers, debunking my hypothesis that they already had mastered most basic technological skills.
It was interesting to see that even though students were comfortable using their mobile phones, those skills didn’t translate to using a computer and other learning tools.
This is not an unfamiliar situation in many schools across the nation; as a result, schools are beginning to implement digital literacy curricula that focus on fostering technical and communication skills which follow them through their professional careers.
As a team, we wanted to mimic how teachers and administrators would build a digital literacy curriculum together using Responsive Curriculum Management (RCM), a tool that allows educators to collaboratively align when building curriculum.
If you’d like to learn more about the process and learnings from our first two planning cycles, please check out Melissa’s and Nicole’s articles.
For the session I ran, I focused on how we can use our team’s feedback to learn from other educators about their processes and workflows. I brought team members from our sales, marketing, product, and success team to see how they would use each other’s feedback in their role and what else they wanted to know from educators.
Our Objective
In the most recent session, I created a mock environment where teachers across multiple grade-levels came together to build a Digital Literacy curriculum that was intended to be shared across grade-levels.
As the “admin” I decided that we’d use the International Society for Technology in Education’s Standards for Students, which are readily available on Kiddom. If a school wanted to upload their own custom standards, we’d be able to upload those just for the school to use (for more information, check out Kiddom Academy). From there team members teamed up to build assignments for each standard and attached a common rubric for each standard to ensure we can evenly measure student learning across all grades.
What We Learned
As I facilitated the curriculum planning session, I took notes about the questions participants were asking and how it related to how teachers plan their curriculum. Some of the questions that came to mind were:
- How can we promote cross-subject collaboration between teachers?
- How can administrators provide teachers guidance when implementing curriculum in their classes?
- When teachers are planning, how can they share their specific lessons/activities with other teachers that are interested?
Click the image to visit our new On-Demand PD Portal
After running the session, we wanted to ensure that we captured these findings and incorporate them in our future research with educators. Some immediate next steps for the Success team are:
1. Run a curriculum planning session on-site session – We’re inviting teachers and administrators from the local area to go through the practice of building a curriculum as if they were building their own.
We want to simulate as much as this process as we can and gather their feedback to continue improving our product and support articles. During this time we’ll dive deep how our tools can assist their processes and learn more about how they’re collaborating with their peers.
2. More educator interviews – Over the past few months, I interviewed teachers about their workflows and how they collaborate with their peers. Based on these findings, we’re looking to refine our questions and explore deeper about teacher-to-teacher and teacher-to-administrator.
If you’re interested to participate in a remote user interview, please sign up and when the next one is available someone at Kiddom will reach out.
You can look forward to more updates from our Curriculum Development team as part of this blog series:
- Academy’s Curriculum Development Tool is a Game Changer, Part 1
- How to Track Student Development with Responsive Curriculum Management, Part 2
- How to Build a School-wide Digital Literacy Curriculum, Part 3
Also related: Introducing Responsive Curriculum Management
To learn more about our new responsive curriculum feature, visit this page. To see a demo of this exciting new feature, book a call today.
Kiddom seamlessly connects the most critical aspects of teaching and learning on one platform.
For the first time, educators can share and manage digital curriculum, differentiate instruction, and assess student work in one place. Learners can take assessments online, see student performance data with the click of a button, and teachers have the insight and tools they need to create individual learning paths.
Ready to bring digital curriculum to your school or district?
Connect with us in a 15-minute meeting to learn more about available pre-packaged curriculum, and how the Kiddom education platform can support your learning community.
