This week’s Web 2.0 Weekly reviews a curriculum resource for teachers at all levels of education:  Curriki.  Curriki is a wiki-based project with a mission to “provide free, high-quality curricula and education resources to teachers, students and parents around the world.”  This is an exciting service because it gives educators a place to share their curricula with others and to work collaboratively to refine it.

Participating in the Curriki community is easy, as video tutorials are provided for every major feature, including registering a new user account.  Anyone, including non-members, can access the site and search the shared resources.  Members can participate by uploading content, commenting, revising shared curricula, and making collections of their favorite site resources.  Community contributed content is rated and reviewed by master educators and Curriki partners have donated whole units and courses.  This helps ensure a high standard of quality for the resources you’ll find here.

Curriki uses an xWiki backend and provides templates and forms to make adding content relatively painless.  Content can be searched using a number of parameters (including standards) or browsed by subject or standard.  Resources range from reading lists to entire textbooks and courses in all subject areas, so there should be something for just about anyone.

Normally, I would include a section on strengths and weaknesses here, but I’m really not seeing any major weaknesses to Curriki.  The site design is clean and user-friendly and tutorials have been provided for most functions.  The only slight issue I see is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to preview content that was added as an attached file without downloading it first.  That could make it a little difficult to be able to quickly determine if a resource will be of use to you.

Curriki is free to use.  You can access all resources without registering, but if you wish to upload, edit, or comment, you will need to create a free account.  Registration is simple and, as mentioned above, supported by a video tutorial.  You will need an Internet-connected computer and a modern web browser to access Curriki.  You will also need the latest version of Adobe Flash to watch the video tutorials.  Many of the resources include attached files in PDF or other common formats, so you will also need the appropriate file viewers.