Locating Aligned Resources in icurio

One of the most common questions I hear as a Curriculum Design Team member in our school district is, "Where can I find Common Core or NC Essential Standards aligned resources?"  As the district Instructional Technology Facilitator for our elementary schools, I decided to push for a grant that would provide access to icurio...which we were awarded in the spring of 2014.  icurio is a product I had the opportunity to observe in Mooresville Graded School District last year.  It is an online repository of digital resources that are aligned to standards.  These resources are tagged not only by standard, but also by keyword, grade level, language, type of resource, readability level, etc.

Here is a quick tutorial for my fellow Granville County Public Schools colleagues on how to access icurio:

1. Go to our district homepage and click on "Educators" and then "icurio".

2. Next you will login to icurio with your district username (the first part of your email address) and your network password (the same one you use to log in to your laptop).

3. Once you are logged into icurio, you will see this home page.  You can search by keyword in the center of the screen.  Type in whatever content you are searching for such as multiplying fractions, life cycle of a butterfly, sound waves, two-digit addition, etc. and click the green "Search" button.  Searching by keyword is the way that I highly recommend you search for curriculum resources.

4. Once you see a list of resources, you can click on any of the titles of the resource to view it.  Keep in mind that each resource will open in a new tab or window in your Internet browser.  This keeps a tab of your initial search always available, which is very helpful!

These resources are all from third party websites, many of which you will recognize: LearnZillion, BrainPop, SMART Exchange, PBS Kids, etc.

5. I highly recommend you click "Interactive Media" and then click the blue button "Narrow Results".  This will recommend resources that are more visually appealing to your students and often includes SMARTBoard activities, games, and videos.

6. Once you find a resource you like, you can click the orange "Save" button to keep it handy in your icurio content folders (then accessible from the "My Content" tab on the icurio home page) OR you can click the "Copy URL" or "Copy URL for Citation" button and paste the hyperlink into your lesson plans.

Rather than searching by keyword, you can also search by standard.

7. On the icurio home page, you can click on the orange "Search Standards" button and then narrow down your search to a specific standard.  For example, I might have the following bread crumb trail of clicks in my search: Search Standards > Essential Standards > Science > 2nd Grade > Strand Forces and Motion > 2.P.1.1 

8. Once you get to a page like the one pictured below, you can click on any of the bulleted items to find resources related to that concept within the standard.  In this example, I can click on Alexander Graham Bell, Sound, Sound Waves, and/or Vibration.  Once I select one, such as "Sound Waves", I will find resources aligned to this specific concept aligned to this specific 2nd grade Essential Standard.

Happy aligned-resource hunting.  Contact me with any further questions or if you would like additional training on icurio as this is just the tip of the iceberg!