Session 4-eBooks--CK12

I know many of you are going on vacation next week, so I thought that you'd appreciate getting next week's session early. S4 is for the week of  2/18, but you may see it below now.

In Session 3's 'Readings' in the syllabus, I had you read a little about CK-12. (Based upon a comment from one of you last session, you can get carried away exploring its resources.) They currently have mostly STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subject material, but their plan is to expand soon and include the humanities, arts, and material for primary students.  

There are many of you taking this course who teach in the latter subject areas, but if CK-12's model holds true, then they will have textbooks and workbooks in your disciplines w/i the next year or two.

Now you won't be taking this course in a year or two, so I'd like you to spend some time this week poring through CK-12's resources and practicing with the interface, so when that day comes you'll be the first one in your school to be using this great tool.

Let's start by watching this brief intro. video that my friend Neeru put together recently to introduce herself and CK-12.




Now, in case you didn't get a chance to do the readings from last week or need a refresher, give their, 'About Us' page a skim now.  When you've finished I'd like you to read the most recent news articles about them from 2012.

You should be pretty excited and inspired about the possibilities at this point.  I was when I first learned about them in 2008.  I reached out to Neeru to explore building a collaboration and she flew me out to Silicon Valley in November '08 to meet with her, and her co-founder, about their work. I was so enthralled that I decided to add their resources to this course to help share their vision, and also to help contribute to the movement myself.

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.  And those are over four years old!

Now CK-12 just really began taking off around August of '08, so as I mentioned above, they don't have every discipline yet. But, like I said, they plan to broaden to other areas soon. Here's a brief demonstration to watch.

Introducing CK-12 Foundation's Digital Learning Tools - #2 from CK-12 Foundation on Vimeo.

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.  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, and as I mentioned before, don't write it off so quickly b/c they don't have anything in your discipline or grade level just yet.  The practice today, will pay off tomorrow.

For those of you that are really fast learners, you may watch this quick start guide.

But for most of us we want a slower (if you haven't already and want a slower step-by-step walk through) register on the site.  Here's how:

How to browse for their content

Here comes the good part, "Searching"  pause it as she goes through directions and try to recreate:

 

    

Basic Customization

To be perfectly honest, most people just access and use these Flexbooks, rather than make changes to them to personalize things for their educational setting, so we're going to skip the editing and creating from scratch directions, but you can watch them if you're interested, both titles are links.

When you're ready to move to the advanced stage, like adding images, links, multimedia, equations, or importing documents into your flexbook then you can view more tutorials here.

So, for those of you that think you have topics w/i CK12's database, please begin to experiment and collate your flexbook.  Review the video tutorials a few times if you need to and remember, you can add additional content to these over time, perpetually improving upon your eTextbook.

For those of you that can't find content here, please focus your attention back on OER Commons (from Session 3) and begin to collate material, connect the content to CCSS, that you can use for your digital chapter or book.  Remember, your over arching goal for taking this course is to create a digital chapter, multiple chapters, or even an entire eTextbook to support your discipline.

Good luck and as always please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

Dave Fontaine

DaveFontaine1@gmail.com

922-Session 3-The Open Educational Resources Movement

***Just an update--I've been trying to email most of you over the weekend, but my emails are getting kicked back to me.  I imagine that's b/c Westerly's servers are down.  Please know that we can communicate through the blog as a backup, but also email me from your personal email address, so that I may have that on record as well.  Thanks. DaveFontaine1@gmail.com

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:  

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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