iCPALMS is a National STEM Digital Library Pathway into content, services, professional development, research, and dissemination that will result in a scalable, sustainable infrastructure to support individual and collaborative standards-driven instructional planning.
Why iCPALMS?
State and national efforts to develop high-quality standards are underway, with the expectation that they will improve teaching and learning. The World Wide Web is home to millions of lesson plans, videos, simulations, virtual manipulatives, data sets, professional development, projects, and many more resources that could be used in realizing the intent of standards. However, many high-quality resources that are developed for teachers do not make their way into classrooms, either because the resources do not align with learning objectives or the resources are too time-consuming to identify.
Standards alignment and review of resources is a critical step in getting high-quality instructional resources into K-12 teaching. Instructional planning activities, including resource identification, review, selection, feedback, and revision most often happen in individual classrooms, schools, and districts, which have the leadership and organizational capacity to make this process a priority. In general, however, the process for identifying resources to be used in classrooms and professional development is uneven, inefficient, and often ineffective. As a result, teachers are left with gaps in curricular resources, despite the array of materials available.
Goals
iCPALMS will provide infrastructure to support professional educators individually and in teams by technology that connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that can empower and inspire them to provide more effective teaching for all learners.
- Goal 1: Develop and provide online tools and services to enable communities of learners to efficiently integrate high quality digital resources into standards-based instructional planning
- Goal 2: Expand the NSDL collection of expert reviewed, standards-aligned digital teaching and learning resources available to K-12 math and science teachers nationally
- Goal 3: Build a collaborative network of iCPALMS users and build capacity for sustainability over the long-term
Building on Success
iCPALMS was envisioned few years back by a team at Florida State University (FSU) that built project CPALMS (www.cpalms.org). CPALMS was built to enable future expansion and visions, such as iCPALMS to take place and benefit Florida educators. CPALMS was built to serve as the state’s official source for standards, courses and a unique standards-based resource collection. iCPALMS is a teacher Portal and applications that will assist educators to interact with courses, standards, resources, professional development, etc. to plan instruction.
Project Elements
The iCPALMS Pathway interweaves the following key components detailed below into its widget-based and customizable platform: