Official Google Cloud Blog: Clarkstown Central School District designs collaborative curriculum with Google Apps

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Clarkstown Central School District designs collaborative curriculum with Google Apps

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome John Calvert, Technology Learning Facilitator and Google Certified Teacher from Clarkstown Central School District, as our guest blogger today. Calvert's post describes how his district has created a collaborative curriculum portal for teachers using Google Apps Education Edition. You can also read or download a case study about Clarkstown Central School District's full Google Apps deployment.
As in most districts, the Clarkstown Central School District curriculum is a living document. We tweak our maps each year, based on student and teacher experience, but communicating these changes to our 800 teachers has always been a logistical nightmare. Even though we have a web based mapping system, our faculty often worked from old copies printed in binders. For most teachers this was the easiest way to work and there wasn't a compelling value add from the old mapping system to change their practice. Google Apps has added this incentive by helping us create a space that is collaborative, purposeful, and always current. The result is a change that has connected our teachers to the map and each other.

Clarkstown Central School District is a central district pulling students from several communities located 20 miles north of New York City. We have 14 schools, ranging from kindergarten to twelfth grade, employ roughly 1700 people, and educate nearly 10,000 students. The district has made a recent commitment to prepare our students for the technology rich future they will inherit. We decided that Google Apps would be a key tool to leverage this goal. We wanted to extend past the tech savvy and tech willing teachers, to the users who would not be your typical technology teachers. We needed buy-in from teachers and administrators to make sure a roll out of this scale would be successful.

With this in mind, we decided to use something of real value to our community - in our case, a curriculum resource portal that was created with Google – as the first step in transitioning toward a new technology platform.

We introduced Google Calendar first because it was easiest for the majority of users to understand. The big desk planners teachers are familiar with do not facilitate collaboration with colleagues and can only be used when you're literally standing in front of them. Google Calendar solved these common teacher problems.

We also created centrally controlled calendars that teachers could add to their own, making life easier. Then, we created curriculum scope and sequence calendars. This let, say, a 5th grade teacher turn on the curriculum calendars and plan lessons for the month based on where they should be in the curriculum. Clicking on a curriculum event provides and overview of the content and a link to the resource site page for that unit.

Each curriculum area for each grade level has a resource site organized by unit. The unit pages are linked to the appropriate calendar events in Google Calendar. These pages display the curriculum which is fed directly from the mapping software. The pages also organize links, documents, and other resources. Some documents are shared across multiple grades and units from Docs. When the original is changed, each linked unit updates automatically. Other sites are created to support professional development in the district.

Most importantly, teachers are now creating unit plans and other resources collaboratively using Apps; these contributions are also shared in the resource sites.

So far, the project has been a resounding success. We started with the elementary curriculum and will be expanding the project to the secondary grades this year. The initiative has "won over" our administrators and teachers. Our faculty is more connected to the curriculum than they have ever been. The work we have done has inspired many of our teachers to bring Google Apps into their teaching. In response to this enthusiasm, we are introducing our Student Apps portal this Fall.

If you'd like to hear more about how K-12 school districts like Clarkstown Central are using Google Apps to save IT resources and encourage district-wide collaboration, please join us at this upcoming webinar:

Google Apps Education Edition at Maine Township High School District
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
11:00 a.m. PDT (GMT -07:00, San Francisco)

Have questions for the Maine Township and Google Apps teams? Submit them here.

Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education Edition team

Learn more about what's possible for your school with Google Apps Education Edition.

Labels: admin , education , gonegoogle , Google Apps , IT , K-12 , switch

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