This week we'll stray from the usual format and work completely from this blog entry as well as the readings on the syllabus.
- There is some cross-over between the assignments on the syllabus and those below, but not all are in both places, so please go through this entry and the syllabus (which has been updated today). Since the predominance of our course participants are school librarians there is a webinar to watch this week. If you are in the classroom and aren't interested then please just let it play in the background. Either way you're bound to gain something from it. There's lots of info. on eBooks and eReaders.
- We'll start with getting our feet wet by reading an article I was asked to write on wikitextbooks. It was published in the May '08 edition of Multi-Media & the Internet@Schools magazine. You can find it here.
- When you are done I'd like you to begin exploring the link below. It introduces you to "The Open Educational Resources Movement." Dozens, if not hundreds, of colleges and universities are now offering many of their courses for free. Through podcasts, videocasts, and free downloads of supplemental material a motivated person could acquire the equivalent of a degree, completely on their own and for FREE! Spend some time visiting the schools from this link and check out some of the free material available for your discipline. If you visit the MIT link you'll see that they have over 1800 courses freely accessible. It's mind-blowing and exciting, but be careful not to spend too much time there. Every time I visit this site, 2-3 hours disappear in the blink of an eye.
- Then I would like you to watch this video taken at Google's Headquarters in '08. It focuses on a non-profit company called, CK-12.org I flew out to Silicon Valley in November '08 to meet with the Founder about their work. I was so enthralled that I decided to add their resources to this course to help share their work, and also to help contribute to the movement myself.
It's rather long, but if you have the patience you'll begin to see the potential.
Imagine if our school districts began to use open education resources (OER) to 'collectively' write our own textbooks and curriculum material, and then began sharing them with each other. Sounds beyond reach doesn't it? But some systems and State Dept.'s of Education are trying just that. Read about Virginia for example. There's more about their plan here as well.
Now CK-12 just really began taking off around August of '08, so they don't have every discipline yet. They've really been focusing more upon the STEM subject areas first (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), for the Middle and High School levels, but they plan to broaden to other areas soon. Here's a brief demonstration to watch. And here is a demostration by the President, Murragan Pal.
Now if this all scares you a little or you feel a little intimidated---that's justified. I'm sure that you have a lot of questions. The biggest concern I hear is about the quality of the information. We'll go into more detail about that in the next few sessions, but for now think about how many teachers stray from the textbooks in their class and instead use quality, credible information that they have screened using their professional judgment.
Now think about how much information teachers have in their heads. If they took the time to write it out, and share it freely with the world, we would have a tremendously powerful tool.
Well, that's probably more than enough information for this week. I'd like you to spend the rest of your time trying to play with CK-12's Flexbooks. See if you can find one to use in your educational setting.
Good luck and as always please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.
Dave Fontaine
DaveFontaine1@gmail.com
18 comments:
I'm still going through much of the material, but I saw this link and I wanted to bring it to everyone's attention--it seems great!
http://education-portal.com/articles/Free_Books_-_50_Places_to_Find_Free_Books_Online.html
looking at the CK-12 stuff, I'm a bit apprehensive. great idea but teachers at my school are already so tapped out that adding yet another task, like creating the flex book used for teaching, might just be the last straw. just to let you know, my district is well respected in MA and these teachers do lots above and beyond any contract. they might embrace an idea like CK-12. I feel it is hard to gage but something I'd be interested in showing to some a few
teachers to get their reaction.
Apologize for typos..I find the iPad not so easy to type.
also just looked at the Khan Academy video..this is something I see some teachers already doing, and they agree with the benefits of spending more time helping students with work. the problem lies in the time and sometimes the tech issues with providing the lecture or directions for kids to access at home...digital divide.
I love the idea of CK-12. I agree with Carolyn that many teachers I work with have so much on their plate already... But if I can find one or two teachers willing to look at the flexbooks and try to incorporate one chapter or even a part of a chapter into their lessons/curriculum it would be a start. Then perhaps the next time they are ready to use the material again they might decide to add or modify the flex book to meet their students' needs. And what if I can convince a couple of people to collaborate on a chapter with me? My goal will be to find one or two teachers that will pilot use. If we start small, I think it may be doable.
Thanks Teresa for the portal address to all those free books. I bookmarked the site but I think I'll have to wait until this class is over before I'll have time to explore. So many things to read, watch, listen to, so little time...
I was happily surprised to find that the CK12 projected exist. Four or five years ago, I attended a David Loertscher lecture, remember him, the Ban-Those-Bird-Unit guy where he predicted these options were coming. So I'm pleased. Carolyn does make a valid point that teachers may view it as a burden even though in some form they are already doing it in a very basic way. Annually, when they seek to start or revive a unit and scour the web for resources they're on their way to creating a digital collection. This is a more organized effort.
In my school district, students aren't issued their own textbooks. There is a classroom set and that's it. Only when parents demand textbooks are they issued. Then there is paperwork to sign. I hadn't ever seen that until I came to this district four years ago. So Flexbooks might be a solution. I am definitely up to discuss it with secondary administration in the district. We'll see.
Very well written article Mr. Fontaine! I also agree with Sonja. Teachers scour the web for resources all the time without realizing they're on their way to creating a digital collection. I know some teachers who belong to the blog teacherspayteachers where we pay to download resources and activities for the students. The people who create them make all the profit and teacher's share materials.
What I'm realizing in being in the classroom right now is that with the current educational changes to a set "core curriculum" nationwide, our current curriculum needs to be modified and changed in order to fit those changes. We had a meeting this week where publishers of our math curriculum are sending us additional lessons to include in our teachings that cover more areas in the core curriculum. CK-12 sounds like a great resource. I do also question the quality/truth of information, however.
S
We do a combination of the class textbooks and home. It depends on the department. Much of the texts are online but then kids have problems logging into the text when home. The CK12 is an interesting solution and I will discuss it with teachers and admin but I feel that ultimately we won't all get to e-textbooks until the publishers figure it out.
The Khan video was fascinating to watch. I think this is a wonderful model. Teachers should get away from being the sage on the stage and be more the guide on the side. I know my students are more engaged when working on their own at their own rate than listening to me give them instruction. It makes differentiating learning a breeze and students can fly through stuff they find boring and really explore areas they find interesting.
I also thought Currik has great potential. What a powerful tool for collaborating across the building, district and even across the world. Perhaps because I so often work in relative isolation, being the only elementary librarian at two buildings, and rarely having the opportunity to meet with my peers in the district, but I signed up right away.
I also agree that creating our own text books can be seen by the teachers as another job for them to do on top of all their other responsibilities. I also wonder about how the readability would work in the elementary level. I'm not sure the average teacher can write a simplified enough text for emerging readers, but that could just be me- I don't teach reading and writing per se.
Posted on behalf of Barbara C.:
My principal wants to get away from buying textbooks, so the article Are Textbooks Becoming Extinct was interesting. You mention that online textbooks would never be out of date. True if it is OER. But in the webinar from last session Neal Goff discussed the problems with ebooks and publishers, such as Gale Virtual Reference Library. I purchased a package from them and it’s great, I love it. But now many of the volumes are getting out of date and I have to purchase new volumes. I think Goff mentioned that something needs to be done in terms of the how the publishing industry and educational institutions resolve this issue. By the way, I have been a part of the EdWeb professional learning community on Ebooks for some time now. I haven’t posted anything but I have been following the conversation, so it was interesting to put a face to Neal Goff since he moderates the group.
Flexbooks could be the answer to the textbook question. I looked at a biology flexbook and wondered where they got the diagrams and pictures they used. Any attribution anywhere or were they from Open Sources too? I also wonder if teachers would want to use them and perhaps get involved in creating and/or editing them.
The issues raised in the article Copyright and You were important for me to look at again. Even though I have heard of Copyleft, Creative Commons, and Public Domain, I often can’t really explain them to students or teachers properly. And actually, I have trouble remembering regular copyright laws and often have to refresh my memory when a question arises. When students are doing multimedia projects where they want pictures, images, and music, I try to direct them to copyright-free web sites, if I’m involved in the instruction of the project with the teacher. But that is a big if. I understand that issues of copyright cause teachers’ and students’ eyes to glaze over, but the stakes are so much higher now with people wanting to post things on the school web site or YouTube or wherever.
I had never seen the Curriki web site before and enjoyed looking through it. One thing that struck me though is that teachers, at least in my school, are bombarded with professional development on infusing technology into the curriculum, that they become overwhelmed and frankly don’t have the time to either learn a new piece of software thoroughly or look through a web site like Curriki. Many teachers have their lesson plans from years past and are uninterested in searching through Curriki. I used to teach history and searched for some history resources. Sadly, I didn’t see anything that really impressed me. In fact, one webquest for the Salem witch trials had dead links. Now I know that the site is collaborative and if I thought the webquest covered enough of my class objectives to be worth the time, I would find new links and update the webquest on Curiki. But there’s the rub, time.
If we are combing the internet for resources and then integrating them into our own "textbooks," how does the copyright work? Is it all covered under fair use or is it a non-issue? I really like the concept of teachers being able to create their own class texts, but I do see the potential for teachers to feel like it's just another thing to do, as many of you said.
I'm not sure how many of you are now facing the task of integrating the Common Core standards into your teaching, but I do see the creation of a teacher's own personalized texts as fitting in well. Perhaps if we can sell it that way, teachers might be more open to trying this?
Our current superintendent, formerly the curriculum director, has always stressed that every student should have a copy of the textbook. However, with all of the budget cuts in Pennsylvania thanks to our new governor, we’ll get over one million dollars less in funding from the state for the 2011-2012 school year. (One billion in education cuts across the state of Pennsylvania.) Our district is cutting back all over, but not in staff. I am happy to say my administration values my contributions to the school. Some districts in our area are in much dire straits than mine. Using outdated texts is a bad idea, but that happens often in all areas of the country.
As a former English teacher, I was never big on the textbook, which the kids didn’t want to carry anywhere anyway. I realize needs would vary by subject area, but I think a wikitext is a fabulous idea. As Mary mentioned though, we’d have to start small and work with the teachers who were interested. I can already envision which members of my faculty would jump right in and which ones would throw textbooks at me for suggesting the idea. Our teachers are so overloaded with responsibilities already; time to work on them during the school day would be vital.
In addition to the free cost of wikitexts, one of the big selling factors would be the differentiated instruction aspect that Dave mentions in his article. Many districts are cutting support staff, but the special education students are still going to be in the regular classrooms. We have more classes that are heterogeneously (is that the correct word?) grouped. You have a very wide range of ability levels, not to mention the learning styles of the kids. Oh, and many more students in classes because districts are being forced to cut teaching positions. (Did I mention our governor doesn’t know what he’s doing? Several districts in our area are cutting the librarians!!)
I know students and teacher in our district who have been using the Khan Academy youtube videos, especially for math. I thought the video interview of Khan provided some insight into why this method can work so well. Unfortunately, when you mention switching the traditional classwork/homework model, both parents and educators have the same reaction - then what are we paying the teachers for? Trying to explain the benefits is an uphill battle.
The OER movement is growing exponentially and I'm incredibly thankful for it. CK12 seems like a wonderful resource, but it always comes back to authority. The biggest hurdle is always proving legitimacy. I wonder if this is due to so many "digital immigrants" running the educational world today? As more digital natives join the ranks, will they be more willing to see the possibilities of collaborative, open resources? Or is this a battle that will be constantly waged?
Copyleft and Creative Commons licenses seem to aim to bring back the original purpose of copyright law - to encourage innovation while providing credit (intellectual and financial) to the original inventor. It is only more recently that copyright laws have become increasingly restrictive, due in part to companies such as Disney. Library Journal has a great article that discusses how we've stumbled our way down this path that restricts intellectual growth.
Like Barbara, I had never heard of Curriki prior to this class and I was intrigued by the possibilities. After reviewing some of the lessons, I agree that established teachers would be unlikely to use this in my building (which is a shame because it could benefit from their expertise), but new teachers may find it invaluable as a starting point.
Two resources we use in our district that Curriki reminded me of - http://www.pdesas.org/ and http://www.thinkfinity.org/ The SAS website is a Pennsylvania Department of Education project that's pretty cool. Thinkfinity is Verizon's.
I have been away, so I am catching up. As in all disciplines, the importance of the vocabulary to learn about and describe the nuances of OER is obvious in this lesson. The differences between wiki and flexbook, for example, are hard for me to see right now, but I think that the difference lies in the informality and extemporaneous nature of wikis versus the relative stability of the flexbook.
I am also working my head around the relationship of the part to the whole. As a child of the 60's and a long-time teacher of English, I feel passionate about keeping a body of work, like an album or a play, as a body. That is one of the reasons I so detest the censorship of some works in literature texts. On the other hand, I do create playlists on iTunes, and I have always selected sections of textbooks for my students.
On the topic of overwhelmed teachers, I was talking to our history department chair about this course. She is "seasoned" and a wonderful teacher. As soon as we got individual websites for our courses, she began to create lessons to supplement the text where the students would link to political cartoons, essays, editorials, news articles, and films. She has put hours and hours of work into these lessons. I told her I would like to try out some of the formats I am learning about here by converting some of her lessons to wikis and/or flex chapters. She got tears in her eyes! I think this will be a fun project that will both help the students and show the rest of the faculty what we can do.
I found the CK-12 video and flexbook very intriguing. As a reading specialist, textbooks are generally too difficult for my students to read, and therefore impossible for them to understand. To have a space to work collaboratively across a district or state to create modified texts for students is exciting. I know teachers would be interested but overwhelmed. It would be a great way for districts to save money but they would have to be willing to provide teachers with release time to create and collaborate.
Time......is always the problem! As I am getting caught up on things I just think about how much great information is available but unfortunately time constraints always get in the way!! There are so many possibilities and such potential to create lessons for students to learn from. It is both exciting and daunting!!
Post a Comment