Since the Ontario Curriculum Unit Planner Official Version 2002 was released, over one million elementary curriculum units have been downloaded from [ http://www.ocup.org ]www.ocup.org by elementary teachers. With the ongoing revisions to curriculum, we recognize that maintaining the current functions of the Planner on school and home computers is a challenge. We would like to explore options where some of the Planner functions might be accessible and kept current in a web-based format.
Consequently, we have developed a short online survey to obtain feedback from Planner users, curriculum consultants and teachers. We value any input regarding effective supports for elementary teachers. Please take a few minutes to complete the survey.[ http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=zhROLkgh90hyA2wDLaaVBg_3d_3d ]http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=zhROLkgh90hyA2wDLaaVBg_3d_3d
The survey will be active from January 7, 2008 until February 15, 2008.
Sincerely,
John Taylor, Education Officer, Curriculum and Assessment Policy Branch, Ontario Ministry of Education.
Keywords: OCUP, Planner
Comments
In all sincerity, I think that the OCUP was way ahead of its time. It was released in an era where many people were getting started using technology. Couple that with the different mindset that you have when you work with a database and you had to have pretty sophisticate skills to make it work.
But, kudos go to the Ontario educators that stuck with it. When you look at a million downloads, that's just an amazing number.
This one unit and those fans of it did so much to bring about curriculum change. If the form has to change, then so be it. I just hope that the original idea and concept lives on.
This was a ground breaking initiative.
I love the idea of the unit planner, but I have found the execution to be less than friendly. I gave up Filemaker programming almost a decade ago in favour of more flexible solutions - basically anthing that separates data and interface. And, to maybe put a damper on the numbers, a million downloaded units means that's a million units that have not been developed by the teachers using them. That being said, I wholeheartedly support a revised, more flexible (and user friendly) version of the unit planner.
In fact, if a web-based approach is being considered, then unit planning finctionality can also become curriculum mapping - which would be very powerful indeed!