May 2003 — Seeds of Innovation
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Standards-Based Curriculum Development
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\par \par The No Child Left Behind Act calls for increased accountability and improved performance. At the heart of improved achievement is the curriculum - the road map guaranteeing that every student is given instruction rooted in national standards and based on outcomes. According to Swain and Pearson (2002), "A standards-based curriculum will level the playing field for all students," and technology can facilitate the process. Because technology can bring the world to even the most remote areas of the country, it is important that educators understand how technology can facilitate and broaden the curriculum. The U.S. Education Department's Technology Innovation Challenge Grant (TICG) programs were tasked to evaluate the impact that technology-based interventions have on student performance. This article on standards-based curriculum development will highlight a sample of TICG curriculum project initiatives.
\par \par\par Project Partnerships
\par \par\par Several projects have formed to disseminate a variety of standards-based curriculum lessons and resources. Each project provides a unique means of information access to users in a broader community. The Aurora Project, from The Aurora Learning Community Association (ALCA), provides a platform for K-16 online lessons of all disciplines. Through a community of projects, ALCA provides access to lessons that have been aligned with state and national standards, and are field-tested for quality assurance. The ALCA platform links projects and enables data sharing with other distant ALCA communities online at www.alcaweb.org.
\par \par\par Project Millennium (www.uisd.net/community/community.htm), located in Laredo, Texas, is a TICG project that collaborates with ALCA to provide online lessons that have been developed along Texas standards. It has also incorporated performance-based assessments to ensure student application of technology to real-life situations.
\par \par\par Project VIEW (www.projectview.org), led by the Schenectady City School District in upstate New York, delivers world-class standards-based curriculum using education technology to make content-rich resources available. The project works with content providers such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and C-SPAN to develop standards-based lessons using interactive videoconferencing and other digital communication.
\par \par\par The National Institute for Community Innovations (NICI) has developed an unprecedented international Virtual Library cooperative, online at www.vlibrary.org. This innovation has driven down the cost of access to an array of K-16 curricular, instructional, professional development and research content. The nonprofit Virtual Library offers three encyclopedias, two dictionaries, and more than 600,000 articles from 1,400 journals and magazines across the curriculum. It also provides 400,000 Web sites with librarian-validated content, several hundred full-text academic textbooks and other resources.
