Open Source ESL/EFL Curriculum for Young Learners

Changing the IQ Curriculum Repository

I’ve decided to change the platform for curriculum.immersionquest.net from semantic-mediawiki (SMW) to the upcoming drupal 7.0 CMS. There are a variety of reasons, but primarily because much of the functionality I want out of SMW requires command line access to the server, and I’m currently on a shared host that doesn’t allow it.

A combination of Drupal 7.0 and OpenCalais provides much of the semantic search functionality I want integrated. Calais is “a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application. ” It has plugins for both wordpress and drupal, which makes it very convenient cross-platform, and I’ve already updated the metadata of this blog with it.

So, revisiting the vision document:

1) Curriculum Repository –> immersionquest.org/curriculum.immersionquest.net –> Drupal 7.0

2) Blog –> blog.immersionquest.net –> self-hosted WordPress

3) Standalone Content/Tools –> immersionquest.net –> TBD

4) School –> school.immersionquest.net –> Currently doing comparative analysis of Moodle 2.0 and ATutor 2.0

The National Education Technology Plan 2010

For anyone interested in educational technology, the above linked recently released report by the U.S. Department of Education is excellent reading:

“The model of 21st century learning described in this plan calls for engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners. The model asks that we focus what and how we teach to match what people need to know, how they learn, where and when they will learn, and who needs to learn. It brings state-of-the art technology into learning to enable, motivate, and inspire all students, regardless of background, languages, or disabilities, to achieve. It leverages the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all curriculum, pace of teaching, and instructional practices.“ - Executive Summary

Although focused on the United States, the articulated vision is certainly applicable to the world of ESL/EFL.

IQ Curriculum Skills Standards

Here are the skills standards for the IQ Curriculum. Whereas “content” is what a young learner should know to be considered proficient in English, “skills” articulate what they should be able to do at at a given level. Combined together, the two standards provide a solidly comprehensive framework for placing the progress of young learners within a measurable context.

The next step is to articulate the developmental standards of formative and summative assessment . Both the content and skills standards will be placed into a framework to define the developmental steps from “entering” (beginner) to “reaching” (at level) relative to the standards.

If anyone wonders why this is important to do, consider a few of the very common questions parents ask: “How is my child doing in his/her English class?” “Is my child’s progress too slow?” “What does my child need to learn to become a good English speaker?”

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to answer these questions with precision?

Teaching Every Student

The Center for Applied Special Technology, the originators of the Universal Design for Learning, offers an excellent set of tools for curriculum development, learning profiles and lesson planning.

3D Virtual Reading Room

Click to Enlarge

Source: Mike Baird, flickr.bairdphotos.com

Surfing the ELT Blogosphere

I had hoped to put up a screenshot of  a “reading room” I’m putting together in Open Cobalt, an open-source 3D virtual environment, but some technical difficulties delayed the effort until after I get home from work tonight.

After having used Google Reader and Ellerdale for a couple days now to monitor real time trends, posts and conversations about ELT, I feel even more strongly that I’m on the right track with a project to provide a comprehensive open source curriculum for ELL/ESL/EFL young learners.

ELT collectively spends a lot of time thinking and talking about how to organize educational space within existing organizations such as schools and school districts, but increasingly  a lot of the opportunity is either informally like parents/grandparents/mentors helping children, or more formally through homeschooling, churches, community organizations, or small live/online language organizations to offer learning/tutoring/teaching.  A distributed network is realistically the most utilitarian approach to reaching under-served populations of children around the world.  There are people willing, but they need the tools. And it needs to be cheap.

There is a lot of free content out there for young learners, but curriculum is more than simply content. And there are significantly less resources (especially free assessment tools)  available for helping interested parties put learners, objectives, content and methods effectively together to help with sustained language development over time. There are curriculum providers out there, but it isn’t open source.

This is a major stumbling block. I think anyone who has tried to do English learning “on the cheap” for young learners understands how important but how hard it is to put the resources you do find into a meaningful context.

If you are one of these people, the IQ Curriculum is for you.

IQ Curriculum Content Standards

I’ve decided for the first pass to focus on American grade-equivalent K-5. The following topics will form the basic structure of how content is organized on the IQ Curriculum website. The content topics and how they’re organized are taken from the WIDA English Language Proficiency Standards, but they will be edited to be more appropriate for a global audience.  I do believe, however, that taken as a whole the topics do reflect a the necessary comprehensive foundation of academic and social English.

The posts to follow will outline the IQ Curriculum Skills Standards, the Formative & Summative Developmental Frameworks, and the Universal Design for Learning Lesson Planning Checklist.

Blog Technical Updates

I’ve changed the format of the posts to make them (visually) easier to read at lower screen resolutions. I’ve also changed the search on the header to my ELL custom search engine.

With respects to the custom search engine, it’s a work in progress, but if you compare the search results for various key words associated with ELL, you will already see a difference in the first page results. (Click on the images to zoom.)

Tar Heel Readers

This following is a Google Reader bundle with an RSS feed for new Tar Heel Reader stories. If I find other usable feeds, I’ll add them to the bundle: