 Hello, I'm Sarah Hutton, Interim Dean of Libraries at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where I'm also a doctoral candidate in the College of Education. I'm a technical standards researcher and author with the Internet of Production Alliance as well. During this video, my colleague Margaret and I will be talking a bit about our case study of using wildlife data to develop history and science curriculum for K-12 students. Margaret Crone is a doctoral candidate in the College of Education. She is also a sustainability curriculum fellow and a mental health clinician. Here we have the WEB Du Bois Library where I work. At 28 stories or about 88 meters tall, it is an ideal location for falcons to nest. And this over here is a reference to the Massachusetts Common Core Standards which provide curriculum frameworks for teachers across the state, formalizing the expectation that all students in the Commonwealth have access to the same academic content. Our case study provides a foundation for bringing these two communities together. The collection of wildlife data from our nesting falcons and the application of the Common Core into an open curriculum that can be shared with collaborators across the state, country and the world by leveraging the power of collaboration and partnerships. But before getting into specifics, I want to express my gratitude to our donors who have contributed to our sustainability fund without which this work would not have been possible. We use this fund to sponsor projects such as this one we're talking about today in this video. We use the fund to publish also Paper Bark, our literary magazine, and we use the fund to sponsor our undergraduate sustainability research award, which promotes in-depth understanding of sustainability topics. I have been incredibly impressed by our students' work, the recognition of which would not be possible without our sustainability fund. So again, a big thank you to our donors. So, getting back to that tall library in our falcons, Peregrine Falcons have successfully nested on the roof of the Du Bois Library at UMass Amherst since 2003. The most well-known pair, which nested on the library from 2003 through 2014, hatched a total of 37 checks. We've worked with David Paulson and Tom French of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife for years, banding the falcons, studying the falcons, and in collaboration with many departments across our campus, we installed this falcon cam, which you see here, which has become wildly popular throughout the Pioneer Valley and around the world. We started hearing more and more from local K-12 educators that they were using the falcon cam in their classes, particularly over the course of the pandemic, since it is a free online resource and incredibly engaging for students of every age. Now over the pandemic, I, like many of the folks watching, have been struggling as an educator to identify ways to offer experiential learning opportunities to students remotely. As someone who offers teacher education in making maker spaces, I engaged in so many new ways of experimental learning over the past couple of years, and it really got me to thinking about how we could connect this free online resource, the falcon cam, within-person hands-on experiences by developing an open curriculum. Having used the Sustainable Development Goals as a scaffolding for my teaching in making and maker spaces, I drew from the SDG's recommendation to leverage the power of collaboration and partnerships and looked at bringing together a conversation of K-12 educators, wildlife and library folks, to explore how we could create an open, free curriculum to bring the falcons into the classroom. I connected with Maggie a while back. We were actually planning on traveling to the ALT Place-Based Summit in London back in 2020, which, as you know, turned into an online summer summit. I was familiar with her work as an educator and her shared passion for open education, so we worked to get her a funded appointment to develop this curriculum in collaboration with our team. And now Maggie's going to talk a little bit more about how we went about developing that curriculum. And I'm Margaret Crone. There were two main ways that we categorized the process of developing the curriculum. The first step was to meet with our collaborators and examine what sources of falcon data and information we could use to create diverse, multimodal OER for all to use. It is important to note that our collaborators shared, especially the early childhood and school-age teachers, what resources we had made available in prior years and how they use them. From there, we created a list of resources that included those and expanded upon them. The second step was to create a groupings of the type of falcon OER that could align with the common core standards and systems already in place. Once we examined our own falcon data resources, we were able to generate four categories including migration and geography, anatomy and life cycle, animal behavior, and conservation and policy. We also wanted to increase the sustainability of the falcon curriculum project beyond the OER framework to also include different aspects of sustainability, accessibility as well. As part of the call to action, we plan to incorporate the universal design for learning principles in all lesson concepts and resources developed. Some small examples of this include using multiple means of action and expression, engagement, and representation. We created concept maps of lessons that aligned with the disciplines in the Massachusetts Common Core Standards associated with science and engineering and history. As you can see in the sample here, each concept map clearly defines the standardized discipline, grade, and time allotment of the lesson. In addition, the concept map aligns the specific educational standard associated with the Massachusetts Common Core Standards to help educators teach the Common Core creatively. The next section includes ideas as to how teachers can use the falcon data to discuss key learnings, unit essential questions, and what resources are available to educators using the falcon data. The final section of the concept map includes a breakdown of each of the individual Common Core Standards in the lesson essential questions and associated vocabulary. The goal of the curriculum design is to give teachers flexibility in how they want to address these questions but also remain focused on meeting the requirements of the core curriculum. While we use the Massachusetts Core Standards and curriculum framework, this can easily be adapted to your current school districts and standards. Once we had categorized and formulated how we were going to use the falcon data, we then went to the Common Core Standards in the disciplines of science and history. According to the groupings in the Massachusetts Common Core curriculum framework, there are four main groupings of grade levels, pre-K through second, third through fifth, sixth through eighth, and high school. As you can see, we aligned with these divisions in terms of lessons. In terms of application, the falcon data had the greatest number of applications in science as opposed to history. One of the other major barriers to this project was incorporating the domain knowledge and collaborating efficiently and effectively with other community members, like people from the Massachusetts Wildlife Department, local teachers, other librarians, and social media folks involved in the falcon project itself. In summary, we were able to create an open-source teaching curriculum. In this curriculum, using local wildlife data, we were able to look at animals in regards to their anatomy, behaviors, and mechanisms of survival. Using new technology about falcon migration, we were also able to creatively create lessons about geography and migration. We also created developmentally appropriate lessons of government structure, principles of citizenship, policy, and explicit examples of how humans interact with the environment and the repercussions like climate change and conservation. We also identified barriers to the project and conducted problem solving to help the project move out of an idea to an actual product that educators could successfully implement. Our curriculum is still very much a work in progress, but wow, are we making progress? In addition to Maggie's work on developing concept maps and engaging assignments for our open curriculum, we also have students developing openly licensed illustrations of our falcons to incorporate, as you can see here, a lovely CC by Image by UMass Amherst alum Chloe Deely. We are also continuing our Falcon, an annual conference dedicated to bringing together educators, wildlife experts, and community members to discuss environmental conservation and how we can support falcons in the New England area. The conference materials are all held in our institutional repository, ScholarWorks, and are freely available to anyone seeking to learn more. As we continue development of our falcon curriculum, we will most likely be publishing the content on the PressBooks platform, which is supported by our university libraries. Everything will be Creative Commons licensed and available for adaptation and adoption by educators. We're excited to integrate interactive exercises developed using H5P, illustrations, interactive migration maps, and more into a packaged PressBooks curriculum. As we continue this work, we invite you to join the conversation. This bitly link that you see here will bring you to a folder with one of our curriculum concept maps inside for which we invite feedback. There is also a general feedback dock in there where you can leave questions, comments, and your contact information. And there's also that illustration of the falcon if you're interested. Thanks for watching. We look forward to hearing from you.