In 2014, Fairmount Water Works, with the support of the William Penn Foundation and the Philadelphia Water Department, launched a teacher fellowship program to develop an integrated watershed curriculum. The curriculum was aimed at middle school students, and aligned with core standards. The first phase of the curriculum guide was a print version. The next phase involved converting the curriculum into an online guide.
The challenge was to turn a dense curriculum with varied content (text, video, audio, imagery, and PDF attachments) into a digital tool that would help teachers work more efficiently and allow curriculum developers to easily add new units and revise existing material.
I am . . . looking forward to sharing the new site with the teachers who developed the curriculum units next week. I am impressed how well your team was able to take a very complex set of materials and create a streamlined and usable online tool for the classroom and I have no doubt they will be too.
Ellen Freedman Schultz Associate Director for Education William Penn Foundation Teacher Fellowship Program Manager
Our research included stakeholder interviews, comparator analysis, and a design workshop with the teachers using the curriculum. Midway through the project, we conducted usability testing that confirmed our general direction and revealed a few clear places for improvement.
One obvious advantage to an online version is the use of hyperlinks to external resources, including embedded audio and video. Additional features include:
