Learning in Playful Environments

Today I discovered the joy of the Ngram. When you search for a word on Google, a wealth of information is provided, including, in the drop down box, an "Ngram" graphing the percentage use of that word in all books scanned by google. For example, if you search for: "define curriculum"...you get: curriculum kʌˈrɪkjʊləm/ noun 1 . the subjects comprising a course of study in a school or college. "course components of the school curriculum" synonyms: syllabus , course of study/studies, programme of study/studies,educational programme, subjects, modules;  More Choose language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Catalan Cebuano Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Lao Latin Latvian Lit...

UWCSEA  is doing interesting curriculum work at the moment. In an attempt to clearly articulate our beliefs about learning and our understandings about how best to address the school's mission statement  we are rewriting our curriculum. At a purely pragmatic level, this might seem foolish. The thousands of hours spent exploring other curricula and negotiating our own understandings could be avoided were we simply to choose a well-established program from outside the school. ACARA's new Australian curriculum , for example, is based on years of academic discussion overlayed with extensive professional consultation and a rigorous validation and review process. What ACARA (or Common Core  in the USA or the UK National Curriculum  or any of a large number of other national or international curricula) provide to schools is a carefully considered package for teaching and learning. These curricula are valid and reliable and provide a level of credibility in the eyes of the c...