922-Session 6--Personalizing, Customizing, Remixing, and Localizing

Welcome to Session 6!  

This week we will be discussing a topic I'm sure you are all interested in.  "How do we really customize this content to serve our local educational community?"

Before we address that I thought that I'd take a moment to address some possible gaps.  A few of you have asked for some more examples of 'open' content for the humanities or health education.  OpenLearn  is a site of free, open courses all CC licensed, so the material can be copied and shared, and you can create derivative works from them as well.  For those of you looking for Health and PE material, there should be plenty there if you haven't found success yet.

I just did a quick search for Spanish lessons and material and received these results.  And these for French, so it may be worth exploring. (I use Chrome, as opposed to Internet Explorer or Safari, so it was nice when I was exploring the lessons in foreign languages b/c there was a button to translate the page.  Worked pretty well from my layman's perspective.)  For those of you teaching English, I found this  and many more resources when you scroll through the list here.

Another great site to access and borrow from is OpenTapestry.  Give them a quick skim. One of our topics for this session is the 'personalization' of Digital Content that you cull/borrow.  Read about OpenTapestry's personalization on their 'about us' page.

They have lots of CC licensed material to support all disciplines (This link takes you to just the courses available.)  They also have lots of great 'open content' for Literature and Health.  (They even give you directions about how to put it into your wiki or webpage). Just be aware that there is also some copyrighted material here as well, so in that case you'll have to just link to it directly from your eTextbook.

They also have plenty of resources for those of you teaching World Languages.  Here's a brief video introduction. It's a little dry, but gets good during the demo around the 30 minute mark. And here's just a cursory search for 'cooking'.
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Next we are going to continue with following along with the "Integrating Open Educational Resources in the Classroom" material created by my team of professors for a Curriki Fellowship.  This session will walk you through the personalization, customization, and remixing of OER's to suit your specific goal or curricula.  Let's start with Dr. Cynthia Gautreau's introduction video here. (I know she says it's the third module, but I thought that it would fit best in our S6.)

When you've finished with that I'd like you to then go through her module here.  You don't have to complete every assignment here, but I would like you to reflect on questions 4a, b, and c that you will find here.

Please go through the material diligently to ensure that you gain a comprehensive level of knowledge with this content.

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Now, I debated whether or not to add this one, but sometimes my material can get rather heavy.  This video is the polar opposite.  Once you get through the silliness, the content is actually accurate.  Who's hungry for some CC Cake?




Lastly, the dreaded mid-term.  As I've mentioned repeatedly throughout the semester, my motivation for teaching this course is to have educators gain the most practical information and resources available for their particular setting.  Additionally, you've all noticed that I've been keeping tabs on the workload each week b/c I realize that you all have 'day-jobs' so the last thing I want to do is overwhelm you.

So in the past I've given an in-depth mid-term assignment, but the workload was heavy.  In place of that this semester I'd like you to still focus on the goals of the original midterm, but strip it down and simplify it.  The over-riding goal of this assignment is to convey the power, influence, and benefits (for your particular setting) to your organization if they begin to embrace OER's and incorporate more Digital Content.  Chariho already seems to be moving in that direction, so instead just focus on developing as much of your eTextbook as you can before our next face-to-face meeting which will be in the CHS Library on 4/14 @3:15pm. 


Good luck this week and as always, have fun!
DF

PS--I've added a screencast below to help guide you through the process of adding multimedia to your eTextbook.