Friday, September 20, 2013

The Orderly Quarterly

Engineers invent technology. They improve upon already existing ideas and sometimes design and imagine totally new ones. Educators are engineers as well. We constantly improve upon ourselves and our crafts in order to better serve our little ones. The best of us engineer ways to improve our professional effectiveness through improving processes we use when preparing to teach. MCPS (Montgomery County Public Schools) adopted the Common Core Standards and subsequently changed their curriculum. The new curriculum has been innovatively renamed Curriculum 2.0. The curriculum is entirely digital, which is completely new to most. For the technologically challenged, navigating the interface can prove nightmarish. I however have a knack for challenges and computer programming so it didn't take me much time to figure out what I needed to do to navigate the site.

The biggest obstacle to defeat when navigating the site is finding the actual curriculum knowledge you need. I can remember looking at the site and asking myself...Ok, so where is what I need to teach? There were several different charts, grids, texts, and people to "lend" a helping hand with understanding how to find out what I needed to teach but I still wasn't satisfied. I found myself using all of the aforementioned to plan...big mistake. I fell into a world wind of confusion and borderline despair...hey forgive me, I love what I do, if I don't know what I'm doing, my children won't know what they're doing...so ineffectiveness is an absolute no-no.

Having said all of that...I got tired of looking in a million different places for one piece of information so I took one of my summer days, went to the county curriculum site and put all of the information I needed to know on several 1-sheeters. More specifically I engineered a more personally conducive process. Below is a snapshot of the document I created.




As you can see all subject areas are listed with their suggested outcomes, in one place, on one sheet. Feel free to spill water in the water. If you teach 3rd grade in MCPS the link below is for you.
 
 
I'll update the Orderly Quarterly's quarterly, but of course.







Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. UnknownSeptember 21, 2013 at 1:42 PM

    I constantly found myself creating similar "one-stop shop" resources because of the visual clutter on the screen as well as the frequent internet struggles that prevent us from even accessing the curriculum.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)