Welcome to Session 3--"The Open Educational Resources Movement (continued)"
"OER's are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
This week we'll stray from the usual format and work completely from this blog entry and the assignments/readings on the syllabus.
Start with this video. I know that most of you have already gone through the OER Commons Tutorial, and that should have really given you a good overview, but watch this video. The speaker gives you some additional 'quick' resources to gain more of a solid foundation on the concepts. As he goes through resources, pause the video and try to recreate his steps.
Next, I'd like you to watch this video on the impact of 'open' on teaching and learning:
- Now I'd like you to read a little more about "How Resources are Organized" w/i OERcommons, then pore through the rest of the instructions to help you more easily find useful and practical Digital Content.
- Once you've finished with the dull stuff from # 1, you can then dive in and really get to use this resource. The only realistic way to get familiar with Digital Content that is free to use is to jump right in, so for the next hour or so, I'd like you explore the OERcommons site. (Ideally to find material that is practical for your setting.) They have a new tool there called, "Open Author". I haven't used it yet, so spend some time playing with it to see if this might me a good spot for you to begin collating your content for your discipline. Once you've had your fill, share out under the 'comments' link below the Session 3 posting. Let us know what you found, what your impression is, and forecast what this trend will mean for your workplace setting.
- When you are done with posting your comments, I'd like you to begin exploring the link below. 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 2000 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.
- 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 high-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. If your eyes aren't going buggy by now then spend the rest of your time trying to exploring the different colleges linked from #3. See if you can find one to use in your educational setting.
You'll notice in the syllabus I had you read a little snippet or two on CK-12.org. I had hoped to cover some of them this week, but I was afraid that I'd overwhelm you. You'll notice that I have been 'polling' you to see how much time your spending going through these resources each week. I'm trying not to overwhelm, while at the same time, I'm challenged with giving you enough information for you to gain a solid foundation. I'll take another poll this week about the workload and will adjust each week's load accordingly. Please keep the suggestions coming.
Good luck and as always please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.
Dave Fontaine
DaveFontaine1@gmail.com
11 comments:
So I'll post as I go this time instead of just gathering up all of my thoughts and swirling them around on a page for you:)
I'm still at school. It's 6:30. If that is any indication of how VAST the resources are this week I don't know what is!
I concur with those who Dave referenced in his blog this week in that I look at some of the material and question not its reliability really but more so the quality and application for my classroom. As I was roaming through OERCommons I happened upon quite a few potential resources that when I clicked on them were not useful for me. That said, there are features to indicate the "usefulness"--thus the "self-policing" idea comes into play once more.
I digress. I want to share two positive finds and one way I'm already using some of this information.
1) As I approach my research paper with my sophomores, there's a great source on the CK-12 http://www.ck12.org/book/The-Glyfada-Method/r1/section/1.2/ that people interested in the pre-work of a research project may want to check out. It puts into words what I've just sort of intuitively understood about reserach. Score.
2) I loved the series on OERCommons called Great Writers Inspire. Here's a link to the Jane Austen page: http://www.oercommons.org/courses/great-writers-inspire-jane-austen/view
While this has potential as a source for my students, I was actually more inspired for them to create something like this on their own. Love love love.
3) Finally, Dave suggested checking out MIT and other open source finds of the sort. I've been loving the MIT source, Stanford lectures on youtube and some greate iTunes U lectures since I started teaching AP. Here is a glog we used as an intitial ispiration for our Vonnegut unit and then added to with our own finds. http://www.glogster.com/msbarnhart/vonnegut-glog-by-msbarnhart/g-6l1u5vhscu50m8h22il43a0
Feel free to check it out or not.
I'll leave you with some questions that arise for me. I have a hard time with reading some of these sources if they simply just require scrolling and scrolling. Has anyone else come across issues as the sort of "consumer" of these sources?
Also, like Melissa posted in the last blog, how can we as a school push the bring-your-own device yet accomodate those "have-nots" as one author noted last week.
Finally, how can we (as we explore this) provide meaningful PD to interested parties in our own school community?
Looking back, I still swirled. Sigh. Sorry.
Hello,
I started by looking through CK12 then looking at OER so I found myself somewhat disappointed with OER because I could not seem to narrow my search to eliminate middle school since the categories were elementary, secondary and post secondary. Also the activities did not seem to be grouped within each topic like they are in CK12 so it seemed more time consuming to search through. Since I teach physical science it is a little tough to find applicable activities because a lot of the physics content is either too high level meant for upper grades or too low level geared to middle school so it would be nice to be able to pull together information and create something I can use for my classes, especially honors level which needs more then the current textbook offers but less then an actual Physics textbook.
Anne-maybe the school is looking at going toward 1:1. That would be nice!
Stacey
Hi! I have spend considerable time exploring CK12. I was pleased with the information availiable. I was however, disappointed in how non interactive they seemed to me. I can see the usefulness of documenting all our knowledge as teachers in an ebook of this nature because it is far more consistent and easily assessable, rather than past methods of verbal notes or even a handout. Of course I appreciate the flexible nature of a flexbook, allowing me to add more information as presumably each time I teach something I uncover something more which my students can benefit from. I would like to explore the interactive qualities more though. I woud like to embed videos, songs, artwork, maps, etc. into a resource for my class.
As I thought about what I currently do....I post so many separate documents onto my webpage. It would be nice to post a single book or a chapter for a unit of study. Given the new Common Core design I can see how these chapters could be constructed. Many people in our English department have raised a question about feeling disjointed with the new curriculum. I think these flexbooks or something of that nature would create the tangible source many teachers (students and parents) crave.
I did notice an SAT prep flexbook which would be a useful tool for students to use independently, as less teacher directions would be necessary.
Anne- I also explored "TheGlyfada Method" ...I agree...quite useful.
So, I went on CK12 and thought that there would be more there for English... I do like The Glyfada Method and feel like I have "already do" some of this when I teach writing- like teaching students to write "out of order" by writing supporting paragraphs first. I also like the section on Ethos, Pathos, and Logos- something that I think we as a department incorporated more thoroughly into Grade 10 this year. I also agree, Melissa, that the material does not appear to be interactive at all; making me wonder how my own digital text will look, since I do want it to be appealing to high school students. Planning backwards is also how I plan instruction in my classroom, so I am wondering how my final product will look; I feel that I need to spend more time viewing models of digital texts in my content area. Still, I wonder about the 1:1 technology concept in our school and community, as well as free college courses being accessible to learners who might not otherwise learn in traditional college classrooms. My husband and I talked about this being a great opportunity, in the car on our way to the Bostom Museum of Science today, and when I said, "People need to, in some way, pay for a computer and for using the internet to access these sources..." his response was, "Public Libraries have computers..." Before this course, I had never heard of free college classes- not that I know everything... I would like to know if there is demographic data available that can inform about who is taking these free classes; this might provide more options for students who graduate from high school and want to begin post-secondary education, but are not yet ready to physically join a college community.
I will post my wiki entry later. Two of this weeks podcast were quite relevant to some of what we have been experiencing at our school. I thought that the discussion on what literacy is really speaks to the new notion of what it means to be a "digital native". I think that this term has been thrown around a lot lately. It is a catchy phrase and it does describe our children somewhat. But I believe just like this author feels it is important to define literacy for the 21st century learner we also need to be careful when labeling our students as digital natives when we truly do not yet know what the definition of this is. Many in education are to quick to assume our students have the skill sets that Fisher so clearly defined in his podcast regarding literacy which are to access, comprehend, evaluate, and respond to all of the new forms of text and information thrown at them. He made a very compelling point that we should be guiding them through this process. What I believe is happening is that we have created a label of digital native and are mistakenly assuming that they have these skills. Many schools including our own are looking to eliminate many fundamental course that would help them learn the skills they need. This would remove the foundational knowledge they need to be true 21st century learners or should we say 21st century literate.
I also want to spend more time on Paula White's site, she has some great resources for creating a truly interactive wiki that would get our students engaged. I look forward to spending more time there.
after reading somemore of the posts I wanted to respond to the 1:1 initiative at the school. It is my understanding that the tech dept. is looking into many aspects of the 1:1 initiative. They have purchased different types of tablets and laptops to see what will be the best product for our needs. There has been a lot of discussion about ipads but with the parc around the corner and the need for our kids to produce as well as access information we need to be sensible about what device we put in their hands. The information that has been floating around is that the parc is going to be an online test so the kids will need a device they can type into easily and quickly. Also add to that the need for a device that is compatible with our network and our other devices and it is really a tought call.
OH here is the link to the harvard free online courses. I signed up for one to check it out after a student told me about it. I shared with my gaming class and AA. Great stuff. There are several kids doing the computer science one as an after school thing. https://www.edx.org/
Thanks for the insight about the 1:1 initiative, Sue! I agree that we make assumptions that students come skill-ready and they often do not. Yes, they are more intuitive with technology than us, but that doesn't mean they have the skills to use it proficiently to be "college and career" ready. . .something that changes as quickly as their moods:)
i realize that i am a week behind the lessons and just finished week 3 now working on week 4 lesson. After looking at OER i was slightly disappointment in the material related to culinary arts. Unless i was searching in correctly i was only able to find a limited amount of resources. On the other hand i really enjoyed the educational portal site with all of these free classes. though limited culinary arts free classes there is a tremendous about of classes on the site that one could take with a minimum fee associated to the exam. I have shared this sources with my wife who is a math teacher. She is always looking for more online sources for her students. thank you dave for sharing such awesome sites. now onto week 4 assignment
I'm really bringing up the rear with this post....In going through the OER stuff, I did find there was ALOT out there for Physics, but much of it was redundant. In searching the topic, Forces, I found a dozen entries on "balloon rockets" all more or less the same. I'm sure there's great stuff in there, but the amount of time trying to find it could be prohibitive. Perhaps with more experience, I could use the OER search tools to get at the good "stuff" and filter out the chaff.
As far as our school going 1-1 with tech, its almost like our tech dept. just keeps waiting for the "right" technology to use.. and we continue to get further behind in all our technology.. its quite unfortunate. WE had the opportunity to go 1-1 this year and reneged...
Our dept. created a stats curriculum from the CK-12 two summers ago and we have used this curriculum since. We were allowed to create a curriculum that was aligned to the the core standards that had just come out. Our Data and stats scores have gone up with this course. Its too bad we are not going to mandate it anymore..
In all of this reading and new websites, its been exciting to find so much I can try to use in the classroom and in my teaching. I have been downloading a few things -- and I messed up my computer, and its taken me this long to fix it (somewhat), but I have now continued on... I did create an account on OER openeduc.resources and have spent much time on that site looking and creating my own page of gathered info to share with the class.
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