Happy New Year from CK-12

Written by

Dear Friends,

The team at CK-12 wishes you all a very happy, peaceful, and productive 2010.

We are very excited to have completed our third year. It has been a thrill as well as a period of great growth for the whole organization. We are very privileged to be part of the education community.

2009 has been a very volatile and turbulent year for many people. Unlike past disasters and calamities, last 2 years have been unique due to financial, economical, and pandemic disasters. We, at CK-12, understand and feel for everyone who has been in the middle of these challenging times.

CK-12 is committed to providing standards aligned, quality vetted, developmentally appropriate K-12 material as well as continuing to build our seed library with STEM as well as other donated domain materials. This is our way of making the world a better place. We are committed to be open to all students and teachers across the world.

Following is a short summary of our accomplishments:

1. Continuing the build out of Content Library

a. We now have domain specific teachers and professors created standards aligned, high quality, modular content for High School (HS) and Middle School (MS) in

  • Math (Geometry, Calculus, Algebra 1 and 2, Trigonometry, Probability and Statistics, Math  Analysis)
  • Sciences (Biology, Life Science, Earth Science, Chemistry, Peoples Physics Book, Basic Physics, 21st Century Physics)
  • Teachers Editions (TE) for Geo, Cal, Algebra 1, Trig, Probability and Stats. Bio, Life Science, Earth Science. CK-12’s TE comprises of 7 FlexBooks each covering – Teaching tips, Common misconceptions in understanding, Problems Sets, Differentiations, Basic Assessment, Solution sets, and Other resources
b. Many partners have provided us with other subjects as well. This is a partial list
  • Economics series by Bucks Institute
  • Human Biology (HumBio Series) by Craig Heller and Mary Kiely of Stanford University
  • English Composition book by San Jose State under the leadership of Professor Linda Mitchell
  • Shelly Goldman’s MS Math
  • A Basic English Speller
  • High Tech High Math problem sets book
  • Nanosense from SRI
  • Virtual Chemistry

2. Ongoing functional enhancements and future technological directions

  • Flippo (online reader) with abilities for note taking, highlighting, sharing
  • Video as well as other multimedia embedding
  • Moodle (Learning Management System) Integration
  • Extended Document Type support for converting word documents to our internal representation for automated conversion of all your Word documents to FlexBooks
  • More print templates
  • A new architecture for more finer grain size so that we can find functions other than chapters
3. Partnerships – we are partnering with many institutes and organizations to bring forth more content
  • High Tech High
  • Project Algebra from Robert Mosses’ group
  • An updated Hum Bio Program for middle school with interactive Flash-based units from Stanford
  • History book written by Ph D students both a US History primary source book, as well as an upcoming World History book
  • An English Composition book from San Jose State professor Linda Mitchell by Mid February
  • Translation in Spanish of the books recommended by the CA Free digital textbooks initiative by students and professors University in El Salvador
  • Addition to the Contemporary Physics book by other authors in Virginia
  • Arizona State University for developing an pre-algebra and algebra standard
  • Khan Academies to embed video explanations of problems
  • Geogebra to provide the ability to interactively demonstrate mathematical explanations
  • Pilot study on 6 books from CK-12 with 6 Charter schools
We have done a lot but need to do even more. We want to make sure that what we are doing is of value to you and your community. In order to provide productive tools we need to hear from you, the users. Not only do we need to hear from you more importantly we love to hear from you. User response is the number one thing that tells us as to how you are responding to the CK-12 content and tools.
We appreciate the well wishes and constructive feedback from users who value our work and encourage us to go on. It is our reason for being who we are.

Wishing for a year of peace and love of learning for all.