Using Collections for Curriculum Curation

Using Collections for Curriculum Curation

Follett's Early Adopter Program

We have been using Collections since the spring of 2017 when our district served as an Early Adopter participant in Follett's newest addition to Destiny Discover. Educators started using Collections immediately during our curriculum development process. It was the easiest access point for administrators, teachers and support personnel.  Educators in our district easily saw how Collections fit into our well established Lab Classroom model. Teachers and administrators loved how they could add the "Add to Collections" bookmarklet to their Chrome browser to add resources simply and efficiently to a shared Collection.

Collections & Our Curriculum Development Process

Our district has a strong process for developing collaborative lessons using synchronous (face-to-face) and asynchronous tools. A Learning Coach will work with a classroom educator during an entire unit of study to develop the day-to-day lessons for the unit. The rest of the grade level teachers will implement the lessons several weeks behind the Lab Classroom team. Educators crowdsource the materials and resources to develop rich learning experiences with the assistance of our learning coaches. The illustration below shows how we use Google Docs to manage part of the process.

The coach and the classroom teacher will scaffold the lesson for the grade level teachers. Teachers will typically use the commenting tools in Google Docs to discuss misconceptions, share additional comments about their students' performance during the activity or add tiered resources. We often find that teachers are a little reticent of adding resources directly to the Lab Classroom document. I think they feel it needs to be "ready for primetime" if they add it directly to the document. Collections provide teachers with a space to add resources, test them out, and then decided that they were worthy of adding to the Lab Classroom document. You can see in the illustration below that teachers are much more comfortable adding resources directly to the Collection. In this example, educators have already added over 97 items to their shared WWPS Grade 5 - Viable Ecosystems Collection, and they're only halfway through with the unit of study.

We're finding that our teachers, administrators, support personnel, and students are much more comfortable adding the resources to a shared Collection. First, Collections allow everyone a space to curate all types of resources and use a critical eye in choosing the best resources to help our students and teachers be successful in the learning activities.

What's Next?

Educators across the district have already started to talk about the ways they could use Collections with their students during a unit of study. Students could use a Collection to curate their own work, and then share with their parents/guardians directly or create a portfolio using selected items from their Collection. I can't wait to see what happens next with the incredible educators and students in our district.