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__**Colonial America: An Integrated Approach **__ Note: This curriculum revision project is intended for use with the Carroll County Public School's 5th grade Social Studies unit, Colonial America.

**__Rationale and Research__** ColonialAmerica: An Integrated Approach Teachers today are faced with many tasks while preparing our younger generations for the future. Aside from content knowledge, our students need to be well prepared for the technological age, college, and career readiness. Both the Maryland Technology Literacy standards for Students (MTLSS) and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are changing the way that educators and administrators think about conveying not only their importance but also the best way to deliver the instruction to better prepare our students. The Common Core State Standards were released in June 2010 and adopted by 47 states and the District of Columbia. One of the stated goals of the standards is to specify key knowledge and skills in a format that makes it clear what teachers and assessments need to focus on. Another forcus of the CCSS is to raise the standard of education so that the US education system is comparable to those of the best education systems in the world. Although the standards are only for mathematics and English languages arts, the standards are also translated to science, social studies and technical studies. Maryland Technology Literacy Standards for Students (MTLSS), implemented in 2007, define what students need to be able to do in order to live in a global and digital world. An emphasis has been placed on integration of multiple content areas but also the integration of technology, which has added another dimension to the job educators are faced with everyday. Both teachers and administrators are looking for ways to revise curricula so that the transitions that we are facing in the near future are as seamless yet as challenging to our students as possible. Adoption of the new Common Core State Standards is already proving to be a daunting transition for school systems nation wide. In Carroll County, Maryland, educators and administrators are devising a plan for implementation of these standards and the assessments that accompany them starting with the early elementary grades and progressing yearly to include the intermediate elementary grades. Due to the demand of maintaining the current Maryland State Standards (MSS) while preparing to crossover to the Common Core State Standards, educators face the problem of adequately preparing themselves and their students for this transition. When faced with this problem as an educator, I found that the revision of current county curriculum would be essential and that this would best be done by looking at existing units and weaving CCSS and MTLSS into them. I have chosen to revise the existing Colonial America unit for fifth grade students inCarrollCounty. I chose this particular unit because our school already follows the Math/Science and English Language Arts/Social Studies partner integration model, which pairs two teachers and these pairs share students and thus the teaching of math and science by one teacher and ELA and social studies by the other. Our school is beginning to expand its integration model to include any subjects as partner teachers see fit, not just math/science and ELA/social studies. This will increase the ability for teachers to naturally integrate curriculum and better teach our students in a more rigorous, effective manner. When considering the existing unit, I hope to integrate all content areas in a natural way as well as integrate technology as it aligns with the MTLSS and align the current unit with the CCSS currently available. Once my revisions are complete, educators will have access to curriculum that supports the current Maryland State Standards while addressing the Common Core State Standards and Maryland Technology Literacy Standards for Students to create a usable working document for use during this important transition time. This unit will feature an introduction to an online learning component that will allow students to start participating in a new classroom experience which will begin to prepare students for the more widely available online classes and learning experiences that will be available to them in their future. The CCSS are a result of several important realizations in education. The need to raise the achievement bar to a level that is competitive with other top performing systems in the world has become increasingly important in recent years(Conley 2011). In 2009, PISA, Programme for International Student Assessment, ranked the United States 17th in Reading, 23rd in Science and 31st in Math which is behind many other top performing educational systems in the world(Munson 2011). As the CCSS are being developed and revised, developers are keeping the standards focused on giving clear expectations to teachers, parents and students while providing an education that will provide students with the essential knowledge and skills that they will need to compete in college or in the workforce(Parker-Burgard 2009). Another focus of the CCSS is to drive education from worksheet based instruction to complex, challenging and non routine applications of knowledge. With the new nationalized standards will also come new assessments that will include online simulations, performance tasks and project like assignments that will provide more frequent, real time formative measures of student achievement (Conley 2011). Thus, the importance of beginning to prepare teachers and students for this shift is increasingly important. An important aspect of the implementation of the CCSS is curriculum revision that will increase the rigor and application of students’ knowledge and skills. It will be important to revise curriculum to provide students with activities that will require engagement and reflect more performance based tasks. Currently, there is little lime spent on performance based tasks, which is important (Parker-Burgard 2009). Curriculum revision will need to happen at the local level, as will material selection and methods of delivery, which should involve valuable teacher input (Gewertz 2010). Munson, president and executive director of Common Core which is a project that has translated the CCSS into unit maps teachers can use, stated that the standards will mean little if implemented ineffectively. Effective curriculum integration occurs when content from one subject is used to enhance or enrich the content of another subject (Kinnibergh 2008). Shifting from Math and Science integration paired with ELA and Social Studies integration to full curriculum integration in all content areas in the coming year will be beneficial to our students. In a research study of 299 school districts, 71% of the teachers reported a decrease in instructional time in at least one subject to create more instructional time for Reading and Math which emphasizes the need to write curriculum that naturally integrates material so that it allows teachers to cover non tested goals and objectives while covering required material which will enhance their learning (Kinnibergh 2008). Successful integration of curriculum should be well planned, useful, relevant and natural. The sole purpose for integration should be for developing a well thought out, integrated curriculum unit. When planning an integrated unit, the educators should consider conveying clear goals and objectives to students, allowing adequate instruction time, including skill development and cooperative learning opportunities while allowing for sharing of knowledge are also important considerations so that when students are expected to enter the workforce they are able to transfer that knowledge into many situations (Lee 2007). Technology integration will help better prepare our students for the workforce and college. One common misconception about technology integration is that it is a static tool, but it is important to know that it alone will not produce learning outcomes without the merging of learning content and instructional components (Liu 2003). Often times, school systems believe that adopting the newest technologies will mean that they are not lagging behind in the cutting edge technologies, when often times it just results in incomplete integration. School systems should focus on are finding technology tools that will enhance the students learning experience. Often times in education, there is a mismatch between the vision for educational technologies and the teachers who use the digital tools. Other obstacles include budgetary constraints, lack of teacher training and lengthy bureaucratic procedures which often slow down the integration process but technology has the potential to provide students with active, authentic and cooperative activities that will allow them to take more control of their learning environment and become active constructors of knowledge (Vrasidas 2001). When integrating technology into curriculum, technology activities should support inquiry, collaboration and reformed practice. When introducing new technologies into the learning process, educators should keep in mind that they change more than the tools used (Harris 2009). Technologies are not deliverers of content but are tools that educators and students use to construct knowledge and share meaning (Vrasidas 2001). Curriculum revision, whether it be content or technology, needs to reform learning so that is enhancing a students learning capability and knowledge construction. Creating collaborative, problem solvers that are ready for entry in this ever-changing global society not only supports the goals of the Common Core State Standards, but also the Maryland Technology Literacy State Standards and content integration. //Colonial America: An Integrated Approach// is a curriculum revision project that provides teachers with content and technology integration that aligns with the MTLSS as well as aligns with the CCSS that will be implemented across most of the nation in the coming years. Because the CCSS transition is in the future, the unit also aligns with the current Carroll County Public Schools content standards. The intended use for this unit is during the first two quarters of the school year and consists of eight lessons lasting twenty four and twenty six days, depending on your time allocation to social studies and English language arts. Each lesson has a Distance Learning Connection, which is intended to expose elementary students to the components of distance education. Each Distance Learning Connection allows the students an opportunity to explore content taught in the previous lesson in another format. Project reviewers were in agreement that the revised unit had many positive features for both teachers and students. An administrator was pleased to see the melding of the ELA, Math and Social Studies content in several lessons. She also noted that the Distance Learning Connections were well thought out, relevant and were thought provoking for the students. The added media resources were easy to use and worked on the Carroll County Public School network. Another reviewer, a classroom teacher, was excited about teaching the unit with the new activities and technology components due to the fact that so many of the activities were engaging for learners and relevant to the content objectives. She was also pleased that the Wikispace was very easy to navigate and that the links were embedded into the lessons for quick access. I was pleased to hear that she felt that the technology would add another dimension to the students learning that would keep them away from doing more worksheets and completing seatwork. Receiving positive feedback only reaffirms that the revisions to the current curriculum will be attainable for classroom teachers and meaningful and enjoyable for students. There should be few limitations during the implementation of this unit. Access to the History Alive text, internet access, Microsoft Office and basic familiarity with Wikispaces are crucial to the success of this unit. In addition, various Distance Learning Connections require students to post to a blog which is available through the Carroll County Public Schools Technology Department or through one of the various free blog sites if you are not a teacher in Carroll County. Even though this unit is focusing on technology integration, most of the technologies used in this unit are teacher friendly and easy to use. In conclusion, I feel that this unit effectively connects the future implementation of the Common Core State Standards, Maryland Technology Literacy State Standards, current Maryland State Standards while enhancing the current curriculum to provide students with meaningful, collaborative, rigorous learning experiences. Teachers will enhance their student engagement and allow students to explore the Colonial America unit with greater independence.