On this episode of Education Talk Radio, host Larry Jacobs speaks with Marika Ismail, Director of Curriculum Development at Waterford, about incorporating quizzes, annotations, and multimedia content into lessons on Curriculet.
Marika has worked with Curriculet since its founding in 2012. Now a division of Waterford, Marika oversees a team of writers who create new lessons, for the program. Marika and her team add new texts to Curriculet and create templates that allow for teachers to edit any lesson in the program to fit their individual needs.
Highlights include:
- Creating reading options for students of all abilities
- Supplementing texts with annotations for better close reading
- Empowering teachers to edit any lessons
Listen to the full podcast on blogtalkradio.com/edutalk, and continue reading below for the full transcript. Learn more about Curriculet, our independent reading program.
Education Talk Radio: “Curriculum Design for Independent Reading” Full Transcript
Larry Jacobs (Host, Education Talk Radio): Well you may be able to hear it in my voice but I’ve got a bad cold. What happened here. What happened to the music. I don’t know what happened, the music stopped. I’ll start over again. You may be able to hear it in my voice, I’ve got a cold, scratchy throat, etc. so bear with me. But even with that I’ll tell you my name is Larry Jacobs this is PreK-12 education talk radio and thanks so much for listening today. Well yeah it’s a Monday. I know a lot of places are back to school, have a great school year everybody if you’re back. I know, I was just talking to a teacher just yesterday around this area. They’re going back in a few weeks getting all excited etc. and we just hope you get a wonderful summer and we hope you have a great school year it’s going to be great.
LJ: We’re going to start it off with a good show here this week. We’ve got a show about effective curriculum design for independent reading programs. And it’s the role of the educator but still giving the student voice in what they’re reading and then taking what they’re reading and making a curriculum around it. It’s really really nice and we’ve got an expert in that field from Curriculet which is now a part of Waterford Institute. We have Marika Ismail who will be with us in just a few minutes. She’s going to give me the exact syllable pronunciation of her name. All right. It’s going to be a good week this week and I hope you listen to a lot of our shows. We’re going to have a good time. OK all week long. We’re going to archive over at education-talkradio.org. That’s where we put up a new schedule every Saturday. We tweet at @edutalkradio and on Facebook and LinkedIn same address if you want to follow us, friend us, whatever it is we’ll send you a link before the show so you can just click right through share with your friends etc. etc.. We’d appreciate that, we also appreciate because we’re very hot on these topics in order to be doing more and more shows on this is accessibility compliance and equity in education. It’s a constant topic. Something that’s on my mind quite seriously and hence we have started our digital magazine. You can read the entire magazine at ace-ed.org the ACE stands for accessibility, compliance, and equity. And it’s doing great. We’re getting a lot of kudos on it. People really like it and we’re closing our back-to-school issue now so we will have that ready for you right around early September/late August. OK. You go over there and I’ll keep reminding you every day. Ace-ed.org, ACE, accessibility, compliance, equity. Key things that I know Waterford and Curriculet believe in all of those things as we’ll find out in just a second. I’ve got Marika and I’ve also got my buddy Ann Brown. I’ll start with a quick hello to Anne, hi Anne.
Anne Brown (VP of Business Development, Waterford): Hey Larry great to talk to you. Good morning.
LJ: Thank you. Happy Monday.
AB: Thanks. Yeah, it’s back to school here in Utah. A lot of places.
LJ: Wow. You are [indistinguishable] going back.
LJ: Well when kids go to school, life will become even more elevated, as it says on your license plate. Great place and great educators out there and I hope they have a wonderful school year. Anne’s the V.P. of Education and Business Development over at Waterford and I like to have her with us when we do our shows. And now we’ve got Marika, how am I pronouncing your name? Help me.
Marika Ismail (Director of Curriculum, Waterford): It’s Marika.
LJ: You know there’s a million ways to go with this one. OK. So I took a shot. Hi Marika, how are you?
MI: Well that’s one of them. Good, how are you?
LJ: Great, as a matter of fact. Are you out in California?
MI: I am yes I’m in Oakland, California.
LJ: Well it’s 7:30 in the morning out there so I really appreciate you getting up so early and getting ready.
MI: Oh yeah allowed like like Anne was saying, it’s back-to-school so we got our, one of the little ones off to school. Yeah.
LJ: You’re in California, when does school start? That’s interesting.
MI: Well my partner is actually a teacher, so he and his son are off pretty early in the morning to get to school so he can get his own classroom prepared. And so, you know, the kid ends up getting there pretty early too.
LJ: So are the kids back to school now, or are the are the teachers just getting ready?
MI: Actually no. My partner went back to school, the first day of school was actually last Monday. Minimum days last week and then full full time starting today.
LJ: And what does your partner teach?
MI: He teaches Middle School Math and Science.
LJ: Wow, I envy that. I couldn’t teach that if I wanted to. Congratulations to him. Is he in local public schools? Wow. I taught History.
MI: It’s an Aspire Charter School [indistinguishable] Academy. Yeah, Aspire’s a great charter. Yeah.
LJ: That is just wonderful and again, wish him a, again my cold, wish him a really really great school year, it’s wonderful. Marika, I wanted to talk to you. I mean, I’m going to be saying that a lot this week and next week as everybody heads back. OK. So but I mean it, the teachers work hard and the summer goes all too fast but they love what they’re doing, most of them. So it’s going to be a good school year. Well, I guess I want to go back to Anne for a second. Anne, Curriculet, which is curriculet.com is now part of Waterford. OK. And Waterford is a wonderful PreK-2 company and everybody knows the work of Waterford Institute etc. It’s waterford.org if you will to check it out see the wonderful products they have. However, Anne, just talk about you guys adopted Curriculet I think a year ago if I’m not mistaken. Sometimes I lose track of time but I think it’s about a year now you guys came together with Curriculet. And I’m just curious, put that together in everybody’s head why the two work so well together. Anne Brown.
AB: Yeah. Thank you. So Curriculet is a wonderful extension of what we’re doing with Waterford. So in Waterford,we’re working with kids PreK to second grade, taking them from from no literacy, no beginning reading or anything, to all the way to fluent readers by the end of second grade. So we start with kids and just even introduce them to the concept of a letter, take them into blending and decoding and then into fluent reading. And so what should the child do once they become fluent readers is they should really build that love of reading. And that’s where Curriculet comes in. So from you know second to third grade, we transition them into into Curriculet and then they have you know thousands of books with support for independent reading right at their fingertips and classroom reading, it’s not just independent but but really giving kids those experiences to make some love and enjoy reading.
LJ: And they should love and enjoy reading. Believe me it’s, that’s always a challenge and by the way I mentioned at the beginning of the show, we have a new magazine, Accessibility. We’re going to talk about these three things to the accessibility, compliance, equity. And when you talk about water and curriculum that’s exactly what we’re talking about is making reading accessible to people and creating an equitable system that everyone, every student, can become an avid and lover of reading. All right.
AB: When you think about equity I mean there there is.
LJ: I think about it a lot.
AB: I know you do. And there is not nothing that’s more equitable than the ability to read.
LJ: Here here.
AB: You know anyone who could read can take advantage of the opportunities that we have in this world. And without it, it’s very limiting. So we really see literacy as the ultimate equity for students and children. And really that’s that’s the basis of where Waterford started, that was that was Dusty Heuston’s vision you know way back in the 80s. How does he take a high-level, elite education and give that to the masses? And that’s that’s the core of our of our belief is that literacy is equity.
LJ: Here here. I couldn’t agree with you more and I know the wonderful work Dusty and Ben and everybody, those are the Heustons, and everybody who works there does in terms of making reading and academia and everything else accessible and equitable for kids. It’s unbelievable and I am work… I want to get into Curriculet. But you know I’ve worked on the show with your educators from all over the country. Mississippi comes to mind etc. And it does take a state like Mississippi with, they do have struggles in education because they’re not that rich of a state but what they have done, with your Waterford stuff, to make reading accessible to all those children who need it, is absolutely fantastic. And we’ve done shows on that so you know how I feel about you guys so we won’t get into that.
LJ: OK thank thank you. OK. Marika. You have been with Curriculet, I think you’ve been there, am I right, from the beginning?
MI: I have. Yeah I’ve been there from the very beginning. Back in 2012, Jason Singer who is an educator out of California over here. He founded a couple of charter schools and then he decided to start to pursue a more passion project which was building out this reading platform that he envisioned. Originally, it was called Gobstopper which is a reference to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was sort of a meaningful literary reference for him. And yeah, I was the first person they hired to come on to write curriculum on contract. I taught high school English for six years here in Oakland and was taking a little break from teaching. And so yes, from the very beginning the product was sort of developed, the functionality of a product was developed alongside the curriculum. So as we shared it with educators, we got their feedback and found out different features that they were interested in. For example, annotations and building annotations out. We originally were just writing questions, embedding questions into texts in Curriculet and then we started to include annotations. So the ability for teachers to pause students during reading and just check in, ask the rhetorical questions and start a video you know, supporting some literary device they were learning about in that text. And you know, we just kind of went from there. We worked side-by-side with the engineers in the beginning, and we, It was just a small startup teams so we all did everything we all did marketing, sales, customer support. So that was the early days of Curriculet. And we grew pretty quickly after that. We needed, I needed help writing curriculum, so I ended up hiring some writers.
MI: Yeah. And that’s when I sort of got into the nitty gritty of building out training materials and a system so that we could develop curriculum on a larger scale. At our highest, we had a eighty-five writers working for us, all educators from all over the US. And. And then as we said, Curriculet that was acquired by Waterford in 2016 and since then we’ve been focusing on building out curriculum for grades three through six. From the beginning, from 2012 until Waterford acquired us, the focus had been on middle and high school aged curriculum and when Waterford brought us on, we developed off that three to six, those levels, to kind of bridge, to make a bridge between the Waterford WEL product and Curriculet. And so now, we have a comprehensive three through twelve product with lots of textbooks, rich layers of scaffolding written by experienced educators and some who have been with me for for a long time now, for four years are more,
LJ: And it begs the question, is are my friends at Waterford being nice to you? Because I have to ask that questions because I have power behind the scenes with Ben. OK so they’re being nice to you. Ben’s not some cruel taskmaster, is he?
MI: No, it’s been a real pleasure working at Waterford. Yeah, really friendly
LJ: They’re wonderful people. The marriage of the two companies makes perfect sense. I want to ask you something, Marika because this is radio. OK. What is the physical product? Can you describe, if people go to curriculet.com, which I hope they do. OK. What is the physical product that they’re buying? Is it software? Is it a machine? Just talk about those kind of things.
MI: Yeah, so Curriculet is an online reading platform where we have we have tons of books for kids of all grade levels. And when a student clicks into a book and as they read through the book, in the margins of the e-book pop up questions that are tied to Common Core. Questions about character development, diction, scene, or things like that. And then annotations, like I said, that support, that help us to kind of scaffold and support them in developing their ability to recognize you know, characteristics and characters and you know all that stuff.
LJ: I have to ask you something which you referenced before but you just said it again, you talk, there are annotations in there, but annotations used to be strictly writing or footnotes so to speak, that explain something deeper on that page or the following page. OK. Which is great. You have the questions etc. which are also annotations that make you think, as far as I’m concerned. But I’m curious have annotations, now with technology, have they changed? Can an annotation be a video or an audio?
MI: Yes.
LJ: Ok, rather than just the written word? I’m just curious how you go about doing that.
MI: Yeah exactly. I mean it would be great if I could, if I could just pull it up and show you right now. But yeah, we have we actually have, we’ve made a bunch of videos in-house on different topics such as you know, symbolism and [indistinguishable] and textual evidence, and things like that, that we start when necessary. So we want, you know, at the beginning of a story want kids to start thinking about what it means to be looking for textual evidence, to answer the questions in the Curriculet. So we can insert a video annotation that pops out in the margin and we keep them short because we don’t…there’s a balance when it comes to creating curriculum for an independent reading platform, which is that you don’t want to distract too much from the student, for example, attention to the book. And so it’s kind of a delicate balance but it’s helpful to have those resources and like you said, the sort of multimedia potential for technology is great.
LJ: You actually answered my next question which was going to be, do the annotations distract people away from the text? Okay it can get a little… I know my nephew tends to meaningly read something else he moves to that thing, and forgets what he started with. OK. But you summed it up. You said it’s a delicate balance. OK.
MI: Yeah, we have writing guidelines. Since I’ve been doing this for so long, we now have a pretty hefty site with writing guidelines and suggestions. And one of the guidelines around annotations is, for example, try not to include a video clip that is over one minute. So, we don’t want students to be, I mean it’s great if you’re let’s say teaching Hamlet and you want to show a little scene from from one of the Hamlet movies, or from a play. Which actually does address the Common Core standards which you know asked students to compare multimedia to the text and whatnot. But you know, so we do try to, we do have boundaries and limits on what we put in there. We try not for example to have students clicking out of the site. So only when necessary will we have them read a supplemental passage that links from outside the site. But yeah, that is definitely something that we, we’re mindful of.
LJ: And how many books are available? The text is, and that’s why I wanted to ask that question and make sure everybody understood that and to make sure, for them, that you guys know what you’re doing there, which you do. Quite obviously, OK.
MI: Everything is built around [indistinguishable].
LJ: Yeah. It’s really key. How many books are available on Curriculet? Are you always looking for more? Are they the classics? Are they classic young adult, are they fiction, are they nonfiction? OK just go over what’s available to, or how it becomes available on Curriculet.
MI: Yeah well there’s everything that you just mentioned. Since we’ve been around for such a long time, at the beginning with our focus for curriculum development at the very beginning back when we were Gobstopper was on public domain texts. And so those are a lot of the classics like The Scarlet Letter, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare plays. You know, the books that kids are often asked to read in high school but…
LJ: Marika, don’t give them The Mill on the Floss. OK, my English teacher was saying that to me when I was in 12th grade and I still haven’t finished it, just so you know. I still owe her a book report and she’s been dead for 45 years so don’t put it on there.
MI: Yeah, so after that we started to partner with some publishing companies to have access to their books online. But since being acquired by Waterford, we’ve actually developed a new product which is an external Curriculet. So, what that means is that any book can be, we can create a Curriculet for any book, we don’t have to have the book on the site. So we have, I mean I wish I could give you an exact number, Anne knows, but we have thousands of books on Curriculet.
LJ: Wow, so the book doesn’t have to be on the site for you guys to have a Curriculet on it?
MI: It doesn’t, and we’re always, we’re also always open… when people hear about the product they automatically have books, well I should say when educators hear about the product or teachers, they know what books they teach and they want to see them on Curriculet and so we can add books pretty easily too, it takes about a week and a half to create a Curriculet for one writer, so we can have books up there pretty fast.
LJ: Wait I’ve got to get this straight this in school. If a teacher is using Curriculet and they, let’s say I don’t even know what book to say, Fifty Shades of Grey, just a joke everybody, but if a teacher writes into Curriculet, theoretically you could have a Curriculet annotated, ready to go in a week and a half for that teacher?
MI: Yes.
AB: And then in addition to that, Larry, we thought we’d teach teachers how to write their own Curriculets so that if they want to create their own, or say they want to take a book and do multiple themes of the same book, they can use the Curriculet we’ve created and edit it and change it so that they could do, they could they could use some of what we have and change it and create their own, or they can create absolutely from scratch. So if there’s a book, I had a teacher say, “Hey, I teach Peter and the Starcatcher,” and so we were able to go in and teach her how to create her own Curriculet around Peter and the Starcatcher. So actually this year at education conferences one of the things we’re doing is for those pre-conferences that they have at like ISTE and iNACOL, we’re submitting to be a pre-conference workshop so we can teach teachers how to create their own Curriculets.
LJ: Wow. That is that is just great. And I have to ask you this, this is an interesting put, I labeled this show, Marika… by the way, Anne, you will say anything? I don’t mean to leave you off.
AB: No you’re fine, thank you.
LJ: OK good. I just didn’t want you to think I forgot about you Anne, I haven’t. I never do. OK. All right. So let me let me ask, Marika, we labelled the show “Effective Curriculum Design for an Independent Reading Program.” Now, independent means you have 30 kids in the class, let’s say 30 kids in the class, 25 kids in a class, whatever the case may be. An independent reading program in my mind means you’re going to get 25 different books. Would that be correct or is that the same way you guys picture it?
MI: Well I mean independent reading I think is a really really broad term that could mean a lot of different things. You know it’s like students could be given, you know, a choice of books from their teacher, so they can only choose a book among certain books that their teachers have access to.
LJ: Ah ok.
MI: Or they could, you know, there’s there’s… independent reading I think we think of like FSR and like kids just reading books on their own, when I think about independent reading. But the fact is there’s lots of different ways that independent reading is happening in class. There’s independent reading with accountability which I think is part, is what Curriculet is doing it’s sort of, Curriculet allows teachers to see what their kids are reading and how they’re performing on the questions.
LJ: How does it do that? Talk to me about that.
MI: Yeah, so because it’s an online program, when students answer questions, there’s obviously, their answers are captured and the information about how they’re performing on those questions and the standards are available to teachers in the data platform that they have on the teacher side, so teachers can see how long their students are reading. And students can see this too. I mean it’s important, you know, for an independent reading platform that there’s that student involvement piece as well obviously is really huge when it comes to independent reading. Most people know that the kids really need to be agents and accountable for their own choices. And so yeah, we have a data panel where teachers can see how much their kids read, how long, how they did on the questions. Some of the data is organized by standard, so if a student is really struggling with questions about diction, the teacher can see that and they can address that with the student. Give them exercises to work on or just talk with them about that. I feel like I’m kind of straying away from the question that you asked.
LJ: Well that’s OK because I did just that second question. I think that’s really important that the teachers are involved. Go ahead and talk to me about what’s an independent reading program. That’s what we’ve been talking about.
MI: So, it is possible, there are lots of ways to use Curriculet. I mean it’s wonderful because we’ve watched teachers be resourceful within the platform. Like sometimes the way we intend for teachers to use the platform is not the way they use the platform. Teachers can set up small groups, so they can have a group of five students reading the same book and talking about the same book, and they can have five students reading completely different books or they can have 20 students reading different books. It’s really, Curriculet can be used however the teacher feels it’s best used with their students.
LJ: I find the whole thing fascinating and what comes to mind, OK, this will show again… I don’t think they do this anymore, maybe they do. You’ll know this, do people still write book reports? Or is this the new book report? I’m really serious. OK. And book reports, you remember those from when you were in school and they all you know. Yeah. And write a book report which kind of half-ruined the book to be perfectly honest because you had a report on it. This thing is more fun to do as you’re going through, but when you look at Curriculet and what it’s doing for reading, as you talk to educators, is this the new book report?
MI: You know I wish I could say. Anne, what do you think? I mean I’m not sure if this is the new book report.
AB: I think it’s, I think it feeds the information that could become a book report. But no, I don’t think we’re trying to replace book reports. Book reports puts us in the writing realm and gives kids a chance to to write and analyze text and share that out. I think Curriculet is more about deeper understanding, deeper learning while you’re reading and having a deeper engagement while you’re reading.
LJ: I love that answer.
MI: The way we envision, I mean that from the very beginning, the way I’ve looked at Curriculet writing is to think of our role as writers as like a teacher checking in over the shoulder of a student while he or she is reading. I mean as a as an English teacher it’s challenging when you know you’re giving your students a book that might challenge them. You know they’re going to encounter words that might discourage them from continuing on reading. Every English teacher knows that blank stare on the face of students who show up who did the reading but didn’t actually read it, didn’t actually understand it. And so whenever we’re thinking about the writing, in all parts of the writing process, that sort of vision of a teacher over the shoulder of a student checking in. What do you not understand? You know, when you know the writing process we would think about, where where would I want to stop to clarify something? A word, a theme, a cultural reference? Well when would I want to stop to model my own thinking. The questions that come up for me are the “A-ha” moments that I have, where would I want to stop and just ask a question. You know, those are all like, like Anne was saying, mean the real the real point of Curriculet is to help students as they’re reading to understand the book better.
LJ: And so the book report comes next, but they really this is really, if I may, this provides, I’m going to use the term ‘close reading,’ it helps children do ‘close reading’. OK. Because [indistinguishable]. And on that note as you’re reading the book, how often or where, I don’t know how to ask this question, Is there any type of annotation or question? I mean is it every five sentences, is it every page? How do your folks who are writing this know where to put that annotation so the kids aren’t driven crazy so to speak by footnotes? Yeah that’s difficult. How often does it occur, or what, and you what you must move those around as you hear from teachers. You know, like most kids didn’t understand this part as opposed to this part. But just talk to me, how do you figure out where to put these things?
MI: Well early on when we were first developing the product, we asked a lot of questions, sat down with teachers, and just kind of talked to them about how often would you want to stop the student? Again, like I said earlier, sort of achieving that balance between supporting them with questions and annotations and also letting them just read the book. And what we came to was we include one question approximately every four pages, and one annotation approximately every six pages, and a total of about three quizzes for each book that cover like one third of the book each. So there’s pages where students aren’t seeing anything and then there’s, like I said, that that’s kind of a rough… I mean for anything like this where you’re trying to scale curriculum development on a larger scale, those are approximations. So what we really want is for writers to add questions and annotations where they’re most meaningful. And having that as the first rule and the second being once every four pages a question and once every six pages for an annotation it’s sort of how we manage that.
LJ: It’s really fascinating to me that this whole thing. You mentioned before that you, at one point you had 85 curriculum specialists, teachers all over the country, I don’t what it is now. I assume these are working teachers who do this after school, at nightb etc. although they may work full time for… who are these people, who writes the Curriculets?
MI: Yeah. So we have writers, some writers have been for for four or five years now and some just for about three to six months. But we have writers in Texas, North Carolina, Chicago, New York, California, Ohio, Massachusetts, Florida. We have writers all over the place. The most experienced educator among us has 27 years of classroom experience. And the least experienced has five years and I actually recently, I recently just kind of like polled my writers to get a sense of their experience and we have over 200 years of teaching experience combined. They teach grades two to 12. We have folks who are focused on ELL, on gifted students. We’ve got high school English teachers, AP teachers, librarians. Somebody I work with, one of my writers teaches a college-level childrens lit course, one’s an instructional coach, social studies teacher. We’ve got just a really diverse group of people from all over.
MI: You do, and you really just surprised me on two fronts there. We’ll talk to you about three fronts actually. You have a social studies teacher doing this? I love that, I was a former social studies teacher. My mind was all elementary teacher specializing in English and English teachers.
LJ: Yeah yeah yeah.
MI: And we have one of our writers as an administrator too. So we’ve got educators from all. I mean like many educators you know a lot of people who have made their career in education have done a lot of different things and education. And so you know, like the person who is now an administrator has a background in English and ELA.
LJ: Of course.
MI: Yeah. The important thing is that they know how to craft questions and read text from the perspective of a student and just write meaningful questions and annotations.
LJ: Wow. That’s really cool. And you said something else. We were talking about equity at the beginning of the show, and this is key, and I should have asked this question earlier. You mentioned that you have programs so to speak and you want you to describe this for the gifted and programs for ELL students, English Language Learners. And talk to me about those, I work a lot with the gifted, in fact they will be on the show next week I believe, NAGC OK. But these these children are, if I may and I don’t mean this in any kind of derogatory way at all. They are different in their learning styles from the mainstream child so to speak. OK. So talk to me about like how you would do ELL and gifted and how you even know where to do it, or why to do it, or whatever the case may be.
MI: Right. Well you know the scaffolding is kind of, is sort of the base of what we do at Curriculet. You know, breaking learning into chunks and providing a tool with each chunk. You know, common scaffolding strategies are included like modeling and using visual aids and pausing to ask questions. That’s what we do with the annotations and you know the images, the videos. You know, videos and images about setting characters even. We can even include an image that shows a vocabulary word to find, you know in a picture. So that scaffolding piece is just a part of Curriculet naturally. But teachers can like, as Anne was saying earlier kids teachers can edit and customize Curriculets. They can build them on their own, they could take something that we have and they can add to it. And so if you are teaching a certain set of students with certain needs, you can customize a Curriculet for them. You know, differentiation is another thing that Curriculet makes easier to do. You know, giving a child a different text or shortened version of a text or modifying an assignment, essentially tailoring instruction to the individual needs of students is something that’s pretty easy to do in Curriculet. If you have a sixth grader reading at a fourth grade level, you can offer them a fourth grade level book. And there’s no shame in reading a fourth grade level book on your e-reading platforms because nobody really knows. Yeah, we have open ended and multiple choice questions. We only have a few open-ended questions in our Curriculets, most of them are multiple choice. But if a teacher wants to turn any multiple choice questions into open-ended or vise-versa, that’s possible. You know, adding questions that are tailored, adding questions or annotations that are tailored to specific students reading needs. If a teacher wanted to add annotation checking in, you know just again modeling, just suggestions for thinking for their students that’s possible. And teachers can also embed their own instructional videos into Curriculet for added support. Those teachers have their own videos that they make or have that they want to put in, that’s possible. So you know, using Curriculet with students of different needs is one of the benefits of using an online reading platform.
LJ: It’s really cool. I got to tell you. it’s curriculet.com. I just finished reading, you have it here on your books list the Island of Dr. Moreau the H.G. Wells. OK I just finished reading but not electronically, I read it from a regular book. OK.
Yeah, that would be really cool. OK I’m just going through the whole thing. The Importance of being earnest, just go over this, curriculet.com, it’s really cool. Marika, this is really great stuff you’re doing. You make it so easy for teachers, so much easier than what I was teaching. It’s just wonderful. And Anne, thanks as always for being here my friend.
AB: Always a pleasure, Larry.
LJ: Pleasure to have you at any time you know that. Marika, keep up the good work.
MI: Thank you so much, Larry.
LJ: It’s wonderful and again, wish your partner a good year. OK, not not the tire but an actual good year in school. OK.
MI: And I hope you feel better.
LJ: Oh I hope so. It’s driving me nuts, I’m really stuffy. At least I feel stuffy. I hope I don’t sound too stuffy. Thank you both. Have a great day and a great week. Thank you.
MI: Thanks so much.
AB: Thanks, Larry.
LJ: Bye-bye. OK check this out, this is really cool everybody, Curriculet.com, part of Waterford. But it just continues the spectrum for them and for ELL, gifted, your regular kids if I may. OK. You know just just amazing stuff. It’s just so amazing what’s out there. It never ceases… There’s the invisible man by H.G. Wells. I just read that they’ve got too. Been reading a lot of Wells lately. OK. Wow, good stuff. Daniel Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables from Salem, Massachusetts. We’ll archive the show education-talkradio.org. We’ll tweet it out over at @edutalkratio. My name is Larry Jacobs, PreK-K12 Education Talk Radio. Thank you, Waterford for helping put this together. Curriculet, keep up the good work. Everybody have a great day.
