| State: Pennsylvania | Number of Students: 1,610 |
| School Type: Public School District | Free and Reduced Lunch: 14.6% |
| Grade Level: K-12 | English Language Learners: 0.4% |
School Context
This district has about 1600 students and is looking to find a curriculum mapping tool to serve roughly 122 teachers. They have a very traditional school model and are looking to improve their district by incorporating technology to help streamline curriculum development processes.
State of Technology
This district uses Word to catalogue and track curriculum in each class. However, for district
administrators it is unclear whether lessons and units are aligned across content and grade-level teams. They want to enable teachers to map curriculum to identify gaps in scope and sequence ad areas where curriculum overlaps between grade levels.
Currently, their teachers are writing lessons, student handouts, and assessments using Word documents and storing them on their local computers. Occasionally, they share using network drives. Often this proves to be clunky and does not provide much space for collaboration. They believe there is a better way to align curriculum, share resources, and track scope and sequencing. Unfortunately, their current method does not allow much sharing or an overarching vision of how content maps across all grade levels.
Tech Needs & Requirements
They are looking for a curriculum planning tool or content management tool that supports several categories.
Teachers should be able enter content, have control over scope and sequence, and the tag content based on multiple tagging structure. The inputting feature needs to be flexible as teachers are designing new content and uploading past curriculum into the space. Teachers should be able to see other's curriculum and be able to identify gaps or areas of overlap. Administrators should also be able to have administrative control and see the map of the entire curriculum across all classes.
Teachers communicate this with their vertical and horizontal teams around the content they share. There should be some sort of feedback or commenting feature so that teachers can provide notes on content. They should have the ability to see other's work, make changes, and submit new lessons. This should be a dynamic, living, changeable tool.
Teachers will be designing curriculum and building content. It is important that the template the tool provides is flexible. They should be able to see, change and provide feedback on content across content and grade level.
The tool must store content from the teacher level, teachers and administrators must be able to see all sequencing and have access to lessons/unit plans, must be able to track/map content and sequence, support multi-tagging structures and must have a collaborative or commenting/feedback feature. Most teachers use PCs and/or Chromebooks though they have a variety of devices. The district wants to be able to see, map and gather data on instructional objectives and state standards of learning and how many lessons are aligned. The district does not have technology requirements.