Curriculum Sharing on Instruction and Student Performance

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Title: The Impact of Curriculum Sharing on Instruction and Student Performance

Introduction:
Today's classrooms appear quite differently from classrooms before the introduction of technology. Prior to the birth of our current technological age and progress, classrooms' of "yester-year" or the early seventies were content with record-players, tape-cassette players, simple calculators. Ditto sheets are distributed as students enter and classroom, while the daily assignments are chalk-written on the blackboard. Teachers record attendance and grades in their paper-filled grade-books and attendance books. The filmstrip projector is loaded with a film for the students' science lesson. Again, ditto-sheets are disseminated so that students can answer questions after they view the film. Students raise their hands to answer questions pertaining to the science filmstrip. They exchange papers to check their classmate's answers with a red pen or pencil. They work in isolation behind the walls of one classroom.
Now, if we viewed this same class in today's current technological era, it is quite the contrary. The changes are multifarious. Music and videos can now be seen and heard on cell phones, tablets, and computers. Daily lessons are written on white boards. Smartboards replace filmstrip projectors and provide interactive lessons between students and teachers, on a local and global basis. Students can now interact with other students in their communities or with students in other schools, cities, states, and from around the world. (No more isolation!)
In Ares article, "Cultural practices in networked classroom learning environment" (2008), she demonstrates the use of information systems in an urban math classroom setting. Students resolve a community traffic problem: "The mayor of the City of Gridlock is unhappy with the traffic congestion in town and she has commissioned the class to improve the situation. The goal is for the students to find ways of optimizing traffic flow for the simulated city....The ...