Seven Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Digital Curriculum

As more and more schools and districts adopt digital curriculum you may now be wondering if it’s right for you.

Unequivocally, the answer is yes, but there is a caveat. If your version of a digital curriculum is static, inflexible, and not editable PDFs, then you need to look elsewhere.

Proper digital curriculum is actually digital. It is organized, clickable, searchable, editable, and shareable via any device.

When used in a platform like Kiddom, you can interact with a digital curriculum much like you would with a word document or presentation, with the ability to scan, search, find, adjust, and present any given content.

With this true digital curriculum, the possibilities are endless. Just a few of the benefits are:

• Increase efficiency for educators for faster lesson planning and more productive classroom time.
• More effective lessons from more engaged students with less “switching cost” during classes.
• True PLC learning with endless content customization and sharing.
• Increased insights on student performance via integrated scoring. Data for every level of the school, teachers can customize lessons on the fly to accommodate for underperforming/overperforming students, and administrators can see how their classrooms and schools are performing.

To extract all of the ROI possible from your digital curriculum and provide value from every classroom all the way to the administrative level, you must use your platform to its fullest capabilities.

Here are seven ways to get the most out of your digital curriculum.

1. Encourage sharing and collaboration amongst educators for true PLC education

One of the most powerful features of a digital curriculum is its ability to be shared, collaborated on, and edited.

Rather than passing around notes, photocopying pages, and dealing with binders of material that are easily lost, disorganized, or otherwise disturbed, the digital curriculum allows for a streamlined, versioned, easily edited, shared, and tracked.

Educators can collaborate to edit, and reshape content to enable better lessons, and the best content and curriculum can be shared, from which they can each create their own lessons.

2. Allow for any learning situation

Regardless of when, where, or how learning occurs, a digital curriculum’s flexibility allows for effective teaching regardless of location.

Whether it is in-classroom, distance, or blended, a platform like Kiddom not only grants both students and teachers unfettered access to content, but provides interaction via tools like presentations, shared digital whiteboards, quizzes, and more.

This flexibility allows for seamless transitions between the classroom, distance learning, and everything in between with no issue.

3. Integrate content, planning, and presentation

In the corporate world, “switching costs” are a real concern. A switching cost lost focus, attention, effectiveness, and productivity when a worker switches between tasks, tools, interfaces, or interactions as they remove, swap, and refocus their attention.

This also applies to the classroom. When students swap between materials, presentation surfaces, whiteboards, screens, and everything else they engage with, they lose focus and then must regain their attention. Educators also must remove themselves from one tool and apply themselves to another.

This switching reduces time spent learning and can negatively impact the classroom experience.

The benefit of digital curriculum platforms is that warm-ups, lessons, presentations, content, quizzes, and cool-downs all live within the same platform. There is no switching between surfaces, materials, or content and therefore switching costs are greatly reduced and classroom effectiveness is increased.

4. Make your lesson plans clear and accessible

Don’t we all feel a little better when we know exactly what is happening, when, and where? Digital curriculum platforms make your lesson plans clear and accessible to everyone. From administrators to students, and even their parents.

Rather than a syllabus that is easily lost or discarded, digital curriculum platforms keep your intentions clear, for the entire school year.

5. Empower true individualization

Educators constantly seek to ensure that every student, regardless of abilities, gets the attention they need.

The digital curriculum takes this one step further. With features like Kiddom’s Lesson Launch, educators can not only pass assignments along to students but can monitor their progress and get scoring in real-time.

This allows for easy identification of outperforming, middle, and underperforming students. Further, more advanced or remedial assignments can then be individually assigned on the platform, allowing everyone to work and learn at their own pace.

6. Add powerful supplementation to any lesson

One of the most beneficial things about digital content is that it doesn’t have to be your main curriculum.

Many schools choose to adopt digital curriculum and digital curriculum platforms for their ability to easily supplement other curriculum sources in a hyper-organized and useful way.

Rather than adding more textbooks, lessons, and weight to learning, digital curriculum platforms give educators a highly accessible, lightweight, and easily deployable curriculum they can use to supplement any lesson at any time.

7. Adoption drives retention

In a time when teacher retention is of utmost importance, administrators should be doing everything they can to make teachers’ lives easier and lift the massive amount of stress that they face.

The digital curriculum platforms that house digital curriculum enable educators to easily navigate, search, find, edit, and utilize educational content. They can directly import it into presentations and seamlessly deliver it to students, all in the same tool.

This saves teachers a massive amount of time outside the classroom and allows them to deliver better lessons. Since they spend less time planning and prepping for lessons, they can spend more time engaging with students or simply enjoying their lives.

Therefore, they are happier with their jobs and are more likely to stay.

To learn more about a digital curriculum or digital curriculum platforms, check out our resources center, or if you’d like to talk with someone, contact us here.