SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwired) — 11/19/13 — , a digital reading platform for teachers and their students, today announced a more effective and affordable way for schools to use ebooks. The company, formerly known as Gobstopper, offers school districts the ability to purchase circulations of ebooks for a period of three-months or a year at a time, while enabling teachers to enrich the titles by embedding their own questions, quizzes and rich media directly into the reading platform. HarperCollins has joined forces with Curriculet in a pilot program to offer a portion of its backlist catalog to schools, thus expanding the variety of titles available to students.
“We founded Curriculet to ensure more kids develop a love and passion for reading by transforming how books are read, taught, and now bought within schools,” said Jason Singer, CEO of Curriculet. “Our digital reading platform allows teachers to make every reading assignment fully interactive overnight. This amazing partnership with HarperCollins unchains teachers from that small list of titles in the book room and enables teachers to teach exciting and engaging texts in their classroom every day. In the past, publishers couldn-t possibly link every text to highly-interactive and effective Common Core-focused curriculum. Curriculet and HarperCollins have now put the power to achieve both squarely in the hands of those most qualified to do it — great teachers.”
During a recent pilot, Curriculet sold more than 4,000 books in just two months to six schools with 1,600 students. They will now extend their pilot through the spring of 2014 to another 250 schools, before making this product publicly available in time for summer reading.
“Our pilot with Curriculet is an exciting one,” said Chantal Restivo-Alessi, Chief Digital Officer, HarperCollins. “We are pleased to ensure that teachers and schools across the country can get a broad range of ebooks into the hands of kids, encouraging them to become lifelong readers. By joining with Curriculet we are able to give teachers the power to add to supplemental interactive curriculets that are complementary to the ebooks and deepen student engagement and drive their reading achievement.”
Historically, school districts have chosen a handful of books, often those same classics that lose the interest of struggling and reluctant readers, and then had to re-use them for as long as possible. Curriculet shatters the previous model and allows districts to optimize their purchasing while broadening their reading lists.
“Today every student at Summit Public Schools reads for a dedicated 20-minutes a day, four days a week on Curriculet,” said Diane Tavenner, Superintendent of Summit Public Schools. “For the first time, Curriculet makes it affordable to put contemporary and engaging books in our students- hands and makes it possible to measure their growth and engagement with every page they turn. This is revolutionary.”
Teachers using Curriculet are able to assign a more modern, more relevant reading list therefore making reading more enjoyable to students. With Curriculet-s technology, teachers can use one platform to easily place their questions, quizzes, and even rich media alongside the ebook so they no longer have to photocopy, distribute, grade and collect worksheets and quizzes for their reading assignments. They get data reports every morning telling them who did the reading, who didn-t, how well students understood the material, and their progress toward mastery of Common Core standards.
“If you want to see the power of Curriculet, visit our school from 8:20 – 8:40 am when all of our students are engaged in independent reading on their platform,” said Jessica Rice, English teacher at Summit College Prep. “You will hear near silence school wide and you will see more than 400 students closely reading great books on Curriculet. It is so rewarding to create an interactive curriculet for the books we teach and then see our students so deeply engrossed in the reading.”
We believe that every moment of learning begins with reading, that teaching is a craft, and that the most effective curricula begins with the inspired work of great teachers and are perfected through peer collaboration. Curriculet is revolutionizing the way kids read, and how teachers create, share, and teach with a simple yet dynamic digital reading platform. Curriculet enables teachers to deliver customized, Common Core aligned learning and digitally create and share their curriculum and lesson materials. Curriculet also allows school districts nationwide to purchase ebooks at a lower cost, expanding their library and enabling teachers to broaden their reading lists-making reading more enjoyable for all students. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more at .
Jackie Morck
Curriculet
Erin Lumley
Atomic PR
925-899-1355
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