Welcome, this blog is going to document the process of developing curriculum collaboratively in MN (and hopefully beyond).

Here's some background info:

About 2 years ago I worked on a grant project that facilitated the creation of over 1,000 hours of instructional content in that was put into Moodle and shared via my site MoodleShare. I worked to train and support over 140 teachers from all parts of MN. Based on that work my district (287) realized what might be accomplished with other curriculum development partnerships. We can provide teachers with resources for training and support and a mechanism with which they can use and share their work with others.

That project opened up a lot of possibilities and led to our Moodle Curriculum Hub which our district's teachers can access and publish work to.

Minnesota is in the process of transitioning to new state academic standards in multiple subject areas.  The Social Studies standards is one area that is changing. Not only have the standards changed, but the year in which MN History (now MN Studies) is taught has also changed. This means that every district in the state is faced with a choice about how they are going to provide that curriculum to their students. It was the perfect catalyst to work on building a course together. After discussing the potential of new web tools and Moodle it was decided by a group of Curriculum Specialists facilitated by District 287 that we should go ahead with creating our own MN Studies course which could be owned and shared by the districts. Each district would put in resources in terms of funding and teachers to help design the content.

We had our first meeting with teachers/designers at the end of March and I'll be documenting the process and progress here.

Our current plan is to pilot the course in the 2012-2013 school year to be implemented in 2013-2014 when the new standards are required. There are also plans to translate the year-long course into Mandarin, French and Spanish.

Updates to follow...