Education is an area of life that we are all intimately invested in. Despite fears to the contrary, we have a good education system and more educated people than ever before. We have passionate teachers who are going above and beyond their job description, and students who want to excel.

Nevertheless, we can all agree that education can and should be improved. We believe that technology will not magically improve the classroom. We need to build technologies that support pedagogy - and not the other way around.

Curri as an educational technology is not meant to disrupt or fundamentally alter how we educate. The goal is to augment great educators and help them innovate in highly constrained, complex systems (standardized tests, grades, curriculum requirements, etc.).

The inspiration for Curri came, as it often does, from personal experience. As an educator I was facing a common problem that was difficult to solve.

My involvement in education started almost four years ago as a volunteer at a local high school. I got the opportunity to teach Evolutionary Biology to a grade 11 classroom for several weeks. I prepared meticulously for every lesson and taught my favourite subject with energy and passion. Unfortunately communication with the students and responding to their needs was difficult. They often felt lost, and I had few means to gauge how well they were learning. As an Ontario Certified Teacher with more experience in the field I still experienced the same difficulties.

Our team met during HackerYou’s full-time course last summer where students and teachers experienced the same issues. We interviewed everyone and learned a lot in the process. We came to understand that part of the solution is to use Responsive Instruction; I wrote about this on my blog but the main takeaways are that:

1. Students need clear (and attainable) learning goals. We can empower students and increase their engagement by collaboratively forming these goals with them.
2. “Data” should be used to inform instruction. This data can come from talking to students, from self-assessment, surveys, quizzes, etc. What is important is that a constant and steady stream of data is coming in.

Of course this is easier said than done

That’s why we are building Curri. It is a framework— a scaffold for both teachers and students to share how the class is progressing. It augments and extends the abilities of the students and teachers, allowing for more feedback to be exchanged.

With Curri, teachers can clearly communicate learning expectations. Students are encouraged to be engaged in ongoing self-assessment using learning expectations and success criteria. Students can change how they feel about a learning expectation as many times as they want and the web application will keep a record of each and every assessment. The collected data is then displayed in a meaningful way to both teachers and students.

We received very positive feedback prototyping an early version of the web application, so we’re confident that we’re heading in the right direction.

Our focus on self-assessment, the involvement of students in this process, and its use to inform instruction are at the cornerstone of policies in some of the best education systems in the world^[1]. Curri puts the most recent education research into the hands of students and teachers everywhere. We hope you’ll give Curri a try in your classroom.