Dr. Maruszczak announced the Mendon Upton School District will be switching their curriculum from paper to online. A team of administrators, curriculum associates and teacher chairs will head to Boston in July to train with the new curriculum program. The switch will begin with digitalizing the Math and ELA for the 2013/14 school year.
The mindset towards moving to a digitalized portal is to bring the district into the 21st Century; making it easier to track to ensure it is aligned with Common Core and other district standards. Having the curriculum online will also aid in teacher collaboration. Dr. Maruszczak said for example, “if two 3rd grade teachers are sharing wouldn’t it be great to have an online portal to upload activities, quizzes, things we are using with our kids.”
Rubicon Atlas is an online curriculum tool used by over 5000 school districts worldwide, including 40 to 50 districts in Massachusetts. The program uses curriculum designed by Understanding by Design or UbD. UbD is a framework for improving student achievement and helps teachers clarify goals. UbD uses “backward planning” curriculum; first set the goal, figure out how to reach it and then set instructional activities and resources. UbD is unit driven.
Rubicon Atlas offers an online component for parents which allows parents to view the curriculum, the units and what the units consist of online. For an example of the parent view visit the Hopkinton parent Atlas here. This is the curriculum for Hopkinton’s Grade 5 History. You can see the individual units on the left and the bars show the timeframe when the units are covered. If you click on the unit title (on the left hand side) the details of the individual units are outlined.
The cost of the new digitalized program is by user. The first year a small population of the district will be piloting the program and the cost will be $1,500. When the district expands to include all teachers in all subjects the cost per year will be about $3,000.
UPTON DAILY 