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Math

New OER Math Curriculum

by Lori Gracey
written by Lori Gracey

The world of Open Educational Resources (OER) is growing by leaps and bounds every day as more and more people contribute their expertise. Since the resources shared are free and open to anyone, they are a wonderful choice for district adoption, leaving the funding normally spent on expensive textbooks to be used for technology to enhance learning. (You can learn more about OER in this blog.) I’ve recently discovered an excellent math curriculum for grades 6-8 that is complete, based on the standards, and incorporates problem-based learning.

What They Offer

Open-Up Resources and Illustrative Mathematics together provide a ton of classroom-ready content for educators with three main design principles in mind:

  • Access for All – The curriculum is based on the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework.
  • Presume Competence – The activities in these materials position students to capitalize on their existing abilities and provide supports that eliminate potential barriers to learning when they arise. Each lesson is designed for a wide range of abilities, and all students are given access to grade-level problems.
  • Strengths-Based Approach – All students, including students with disabilities, are resourceful and resilient members of the mathematics community. When the unique strengths and interests of students with disabilities are highlighted during class discussions, their contributions enhance the learning of all students in the classroom.

In addition, the curriculum offers support in each lesson for students with disabilities and for English Language Learners (ELLs). And assessments for each unit are also available, along with practice problems, downloads, and family materials. All of the content can be accessed via print, imported into a district LMS, or used in OneNote.

A typical lesson includes four parts:OER math

  • A warm-up
  • One or more instructional activities
  • The lesson synthesis
  • A cool-down

There is a detailed teacher’s guide as well, making this a complete package for middle school mathematics. Tested in 175 classrooms during the 2016-2017 school year, this content is well worth your time. And with the money you save from not buying textbooks, you can provide more professional development for staff and more technology resources for students. It’s a definite win/win.

 

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OER
Educational Trends

Geo Goes OER

by Guest Blogger
written by Guest Blogger

Open Educational Resources (OER) are a “part of the global open content movement, are shared teaching, learning, and research resources available under legally recognized open licenses — free for people to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute.” (Edutopia) The Texas Legislature has recently sent strong signals that Texas districts should take advantage of these resources.  Why are high quality OER resources important?

  • They save teachers time and effort.
  • They can help to fuel collaboration.
  • They encourage the improvement of available materials.
  • They aid in the dissemination of best practices.

OpenA perfect exemplar of OER activities created for English, math, science, and social studies are GeoInquiries; they enhance key content concepts using the free ArcGIS Online geographic mapping website. These content collections, created by teachers for teachers, contain 15 free activities that correspond to and extend map-based concepts in leading textbooks. The activities use a standard inquiry-based instructional model, require only 15 minutes for a teacher to deliver, and are device agnostic. The activities harmonize with the standards for each content area. Current collections include:

Earth Systems Science AP Human Geography
Mathematics U.S. History
American Literature Elementary
World History Environmental Science

 

openGeoInquiries can be used out of the box or customized, and since they are in the Creative Commons, they make a great starting point to meet the needs of a changing classroom. Thanks to the new “Hacking GeoInquiries” wiki, teachers now have a guide with suggestions for going further and customizing the data or instructional activities included in the GeoInquiries to better meet student needs.

ESRI, the software company who created ArcGIS Online, contracted with teachers who have been teaching for years with the geographic mapping web interface to teach content to students. These teacher developers created 120 activities and maps using over 750 data sets, creating limitless content connections and combinations. As a testament to the quality of the materials, there has been a steady increase in downloads of the activities, topping 70,000 a month.  States like Virginia, Arkansas, and New Hampshire have the heaviest use with special interest in U.S. History and AP Human Geography.

In addition to the creation of the national standards-based GeoInquiries, there are state initiatives in Texas, Georgia, and Minnesota to create state curriculum-driven GeoInquiry OERs. For example, in Texas, the education focus group requested middle school Texas state history GeoInquiries, and a teacher group is currently developing those.

These resources are shared using the Creative Commons B/NC/SA license. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially and commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This means you can adapt the lessons to meet the needs of your students and to align with your state’s standards. Check out these resources to see how they can be used with your students.

This post was written by Tom Baker and Anita Palmer. Tom is an education outreach manager for ESRI. He specializes in curriculum development, teacher education, and research. Anita Palmer of GISetc, is a past technology teacher who specializes in teacher professional development and curriculum design and development.

Photo Credit: Compass by  Calsidyrose 

 

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FundingGood TeachingGoogle Tips and TricksMicrosoft Tips and Tricks

Creative Commons: Make OER Copyright Simple

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

As TCEA works with various school districts, one question that often arises is “What can I use in my classroom with students?”  Teachers are often unsure about copyright. With Open Educational Resources (OER), teachers may find their copyright confusion compounded. In this blog entry, we will explore Creative Commons copyright and Open Educational Resources. We will also explore some actual student-created OER materials.

Ready to Remix?

Creative Commons copyright licenses allow you to remix content available on the web. The license the creator has set determines classroom usage. When considering content for OER, it must meet specific criteria. Those criteria include the following:

  • Licensed content must be free for any individual to use.
  • The content is licensed for unlimited distribution.
  • The content allows for adaptation, translation, remixing, and improvement.

This diagram explores the various types of Creative Common licenses available. For my own work, I prefer to use Attribution-ShareAlike. That copyright licensing ensures I am given credit for my work and that others attribute work to me. What’s more, it ensure that others can distribute my work (Share Alike) with wide audience in the same way I shared it with them. This satisfies my desire to ensure my content is cited, accessible, and remix-able by anyone.

creative commons

In addition to text, you can find a rich variety of images, audio, and video licensed as Creative Commons. You can also find content via Google Image Search, as well as by using the Chrome extension Image Google Search. My favorite find in the Creative Commons space includes a YouTube Audio Library, “Audio that is copyright free.”

Why Use Creative Commons (CC)?

Ideal for OER, Creative Commons is often used for the following reasons:

  • Makes content more accessible, adding to the 800 million CC-licensed works
  • Saves money by being less expensive since CC works avoid copyright fees, administrative costs, and make it easy to share education resources online
  • Empowers educators to reuse, remix, and adapt resources since permission has been granted
  • Enhances equity for all users who have access
  • Digital multimedia sharing is made easy
  • Legal because copyright violations are lessened and expectations for reuse are clear

Does All Creative Commons Copyright Lend Itself to OER?

Not all content licensed as Creative Commons can be used for open educational resources. This chart clarifies usage:

creative commons

 

As you can see from the chart above, work that is labeled as No Derivatives (ND) may not be used as OER. This presumes that the intent of materials for OER will allow teachers (and their students) to remix content. This is important since students and their teachers intent on creating their own digital textbooks may remix OER content from each other.

Can Students and Teachers Create OER Materials?

As you may have surmised, students and teacher can create OER materials (e.g. digital textbooks, websites, documents, images, videos, and audio files) that they can share with others. In fact, it’s easy to imagine groups of students learning how to use digital tools to create content that can be remixed by other students. Those other students may be in classrooms near by, far away, or around the world.

Here are four resources to explore when curating or creating OER materials with colleagues and/or students. More are added at the end of this blog entry for your review.

Ready to Create Your Own?

Creating content that will be remixed by others can be quite exciting. You can get your start simply with three tools. Consider that how you license content is what determines whether it is OER, not what tool you used to create it.

  • Google Docs ePub export – This tool provides for an easy way to create ePub-formatted ebooks. You can also export to Word, ODF, or PDF.
  • Book Creator – It allows you to create a simple ePub without media or an enhanced ePub with video, audio, and more embedded.
  • OneNote – Microsoft OneNote makes digital textbook creation easy. Students can work together on a single OneNote notebook that is organized into “notebook, section groups, sections, and pages.”

Once you have created your resource, share it with TCEA:

    1. Create a digital document using your tool of choice, then license it as Creative Commons license friendly to OER.
    2. When complete, submit it online. Add “OER: [Your Title]” to the title with a short description.
    3. View the contributions of others.

Creating OER Materials can be quite rewarding. Engage student learners, as well as teachers’ creativity, to create your classroom and/or school’s own OER resources. If you have Google Docs or Office 365, the tools are already at your fingertips to create accessible global learning opportunities.

Resources and Sources of OER

Other Curated Resources

 

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Open Education Resources
AdvocacyEducational Trends

Texas Going Open, Thanks to Legislation

by Jennifer Bergland
written by Jennifer Bergland

Last October, I wrote a blog post on Open Education Resources (OER). While doing the research, I realized that the state of Texas needed to do a better job of embracing and promoting these resources. This led to the drafting and eventually passing of several bills that will make it easier for teachers and districts to access and utilize high-quality open education resources. SB 810 defined OER as:

Resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that allows for free use,
reuse, modification, and sharing with others

What That Means

The key phrases in the definition are “free,” “reuse,” and “modify.” In order for a resource to be considered an open resource, it has to not only be free, but the user must also have the rights to reuse all or part of it for his own purpose. Let’s take, for example, a high school English literature teacher preparing to teach a unit on Shakespeare who finds the play As You Like It, on the OER Commons website. In order for this resource to truly be an openly-licensed material, the entity that is hosting this resource would grant the teacher the rights to use and adapt all or part of the play. You will notice that the license allows you to remix and share the resource so it qualifies as an OER.

The legal definition of open educational resources, as defined by SB 810, also identifies these resources as full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, or any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. As an example, Pearson has a sixth grade math course available which a district could use as is or adapt to meet the district’s specific learning goals. This course could easily be inserted into a district learning management system and be reworked and adjusted to meet the district’s curriculum design.

Texas Use of OER

The ability to take a resource and adapt it to meet a district’s scope and sequence and learning objectives is one of the reasons Texas districts have begun investigating and using open education resources. According to the most recent SpeakUp Survey, 42% of Texas administrators have implemented some form of OER within their district, and an additional 12% are considering it. 44% of the technology leaders in Texas consider OER to be one of the high growth digital initiatives.

SpeakUp Survey

These numbers will increase as some as the elements of SB 810 are implemented. TEA is required to have an OER repository that will be used by educators as a place to share materials created by districts, teachers, or the state. The new law also will create an instructional materials review service that will compare materials based on price, technical requirements, TEKS alignment, and editorial reviews. This service will help provide the quality control that has been missing for free materials.

Openstax LogoIn addition, the state budget for the next two years includes $20 million for the state to arrange for an outside entity to produce open educational resources for the state’s use.  It is expected that TEA will begin with instructional materials that meet the specifications for the English Language Arts adoption that will be implemented in the 2019-2020 school year. This would give districts the ability to use high-quality OER materials for this adoption, which has the potential to save them money. TEA recently announced the availability of some OER that were acquired by TEA for district use. 

 

Open Educational Resources Blog Series

To help facilitate the exploration of open educational resources, I will write a monthly blog post that will hopefully answer the questions you may have. Some of the things I hope to address in the blog series are:

  • What districts in Texas are using open education resources and with what results
  • What resources are already available, both within and outside of Texas
  • Updates on the implementation of the OER bills that were  recently passed
  • How to create your own OER
  • How to give attribution for open education resources and what the different licenses mean  
  • The best practices in implementing OER.

These are just a few of the topics we will explore. Please use the comment section below to give me feedback or ask the burning questions you may have.  See you next month!

 

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Texas legislature
Advocacy

Happenings in the Texas Legislature

by Jennifer Bergland
written by Jennifer Bergland

Things are hopping at the Texas State Capitol. The legislature has been in session since January 8, so they only have around 74 days left to get their legislation passed. Getting a bill passed is no small feat. A bill must pass both chambers with the exact same language. This involves hearings, testimonies, possible amendments which change the bill, votes in both the committees and the chambers, and then a trip through a conference committee made up of members from both chambers to negotiate language they think will pass both the House and the Senate. Once the bill passes, it then goes to the governor’s desk for either his signature or veto. In the last legislative session, 6,276 bills were filed and only 1,322 were passed, of which forty-four were vetoed by the governor. Out of 6,276 bills, only 1,278 became law. This means that any bill filed only has about a 20% chance of becoming a law.

Most of the bills that have been filed this session have little to do with digital learning. But those that do will be on TCEA’s radar. March 10 was the last day that legislators could file bills, so I have been carefully making a list to see which bills are naughty or nice. I am trying to determine which bills will promote the use of technology in Texas classrooms and which might establish barriers. I use the legislative priorities approved by the TCEA board to guide my efforts.

If you want to see what bills from the Texas Legislature may have an effect on the use of technology in Texas schools, checkout TCEA’s advocacy page. You can also signup to get Action Alerts if you want to be notified when we need individuals to reach out to their state legislators on important issues.

Digital Learning Bills That Have Been Filed

TCEA has already worked with several House and Senate members to file legislation that we believe will help create an environment for student innovation and mastery of the state standards. Below is a list of the bills that have been filed with our assistance:

SB 1481 (Senator Larry Taylor) and HB – 4140 (Representative DeWayne Bohac) – These bills change the name of the IMA to the Instructional Materials and Technology Fund. They also require the SBOE to update the Long-Range Plan for Technology at least every five years. It will require school districts to create and use a technology plan that is aligned to the state’s plan and requires school districts to consider Open Education Resources (OER) when they adopt new instructional materials.

SB 1482 (Senator Larry Taylor) – This bill will create a 15-member commission to make recommendations for establishing a framework to incorporate digital teaching and learning in public schools.

SB 1483 (Senator Larry Taylor) and HB 4139 (Representative DeWayne Bohac) – These bills resurrect the Technology Lending grants and allow the Commissioner of Education to appropriate up to $25 million from the IMA for these grants.

SB 1484 (Senator Larry Taylor)and  HB 3487 (Representative Dan Huberty) – These bills incentivize the creation and sharing of high-quality OER by creating a digital repository for OER and digital materials and a system that will assist districts in the review and selection of instructional materials. The goal is to provide districts with the kind of information necessary to acquire high-quality materials at the best price.

SB 2050 (Senator Larry Taylor) and HB 4064 (Representative DeWayne Bohac) – These bills would require pre-service teachers to take a digital literacy exam while they are in college. It also requires the SBEC to create rules regarding continuing education credits for the purpose of increasing an in-service educator’s technology proficiency.

SB 1685 (Senator Larry Taylor) and HB 395 (Representative Cecil Bell) – These bills will move the Technology Applications courses into the CTE curriculum, which would generate weighted funding for each student who takes these courses. It would also require the SBOE to review the courses and remove any duplicated courses.

SB 1279 (Senator Larry Taylor) and HB 2087  (Representative Gary VanDeaver) – These bills will require technology providers to protect student’s personally-identifiable information.

Make Sure You’re in the Know

These and other bills that will impact the use of technology in Texas classrooms will be monitored as they move through the legislative process. We will provide up-to-date information on our site and will send this information to those who want to receive Action Alerts. Remember that these are YOUR legislators talking about YOUR issues, so stay involved!

 

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math and science
Content AreasGood Teaching

Open Resources for Math and Science

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Need to model complex math and science concepts for your students? Use any of the 130 award-winning PhET math and science interactive simulations. Available for grades three through adult learners, these are  open educational resources (OERs), which means they are free to use. Each simulation will work on any device, making it perfect for 1:1 and BYOD classrooms, as well as those with only teacher projection.

Explore Simulations

Each PhET lesson (e.g. Balloons and Static Electricity simulation) comes replete with resources. Included are a video primer, lesson ideas, and teacher-submitted activities. Watch this video for an overview. A main goal of PhET is to assist students in becoming scientists. As learner-in-chief in their classroom, teachers ask questions (combine them with Quizziz or Kahoot for quick assessment) to highlight key concepts and spur deeper inquiry.

Measure Learning with Your Favorite Learning Management System (LMS)

Combine PhET and the Learning Management System (LMS) of choice to further support student learning. This can help students see what factors affect friction. Students can then respond to multiple choice questions or elaborate in short answer form.

Did you know? You can learn how to blend technology into instruction. Schedule an online or face-to-face professional learning session with TCEA’s Certified professional learning team.

Support Open Inquiry

Another approach involves using a student-centered strategy called POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning). Students work in small groups with individual roles or in cooperative learning groups if the learning needs to be scaffolded. POGIL activities focus on core concepts. They encourage a deep understanding of course material and develop higher-order thinking skills. Find out more | See it in Action

Engage in Video-Based Reflection

Deepen reflective interactions focused on a simulation with video. Use Flipgrid to pose video questions about a simulation’s key concepts. Students respond via their mobile device’s built-in video camera.

Conclusion

These approaches and technologies are so easy, you can get going quickly. Select your interactive simulation and scaffold the inquiry with POGIL. Then, assess learning with retrieval practice tools (like Quizizz/Kahoot), and Flipgrid. Your students will be thrilled you made the effort!

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#GoOpen
AdvocacyEducational TrendsFundingUncategorized

It’s Time: #GoOpen

by Jennifer Bergland
written by Jennifer Bergland

Many districts across the country are beginning to write or adapt existing educational materials in order to ensure the resources they place in front of their students closely align with their learning objectives. The #GoOpen initiative by the U.S. Department of Education is designed to help facilitate this movement. #GoOpen is the slogan for the DOE’s campaign that encourages states, school districts, and educators to use openly-licensed educational materials to transform teaching and learning. These materials are also known as OER (Open Educational Resources).

You might be asking, what are open education resources? Great question. Openly-licensed educational resources Pillars of OER
are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under a license that permits their free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others. Not all OER materials are digital, but the #GoOpen movement is primarily focusing on those that are.

It’s important to note the difference between the terms “free” and “open.” A resource may be free, but you may not have the owner’s permission to reuse or modify the resource. To qualify as open, it must be free and provide users permission to modify and reuse the materials.

Why would a district want to create or modify instructional materials? Some districts claim that openly-licensed educational resources can drive equity by providing all students access to high-quality learning materials, no matter the size of the district’s budget. They also allow districts to update the learning materials whenever necessary either to support new state standards or to update the content.

Also, districts are seeing that the process of developing the materials energizes their teachers as they adapt and customize the learning materials to the needs of the students in their district. In addition to all of these great reasons, there also can be significant cost savings, which can translate into more funds for high-speed technical infrastructure and digital devices that can be used to access the new materials.

open-stickiesHow does a district get started? In order to support districts who are interested in developing some openly licensed educational resources, the #GoOpen campaign has developed a network of states and districts to serve as models and provide support and assistance. A great place to start is by downloading the GoOpen District Launch Packet. It has step-by-step instructions on how to approach the process. It tells you who should be involved, what types of questions you need to consider, and where to begin.

It also might be helpful to look at what some other districts are doing. The #GoOpen site has a list of districts grouped by their expertise and willingness to mentor other districts. They divide the districts up into two lists: #GoOpen Launch Districts and #GoOpen Ambassador Districts.

#GoOpen Launch Districts Will:

  • Identify a district #GoOpen team who will work to develop a strategy for the implementation of openly-licensed educational materials.
  • Commit to replace at least one textbook with openly-licensed educational materials in the next year.
  • Document and share their implementation process.

#GoOpen Ambassador Districts Will:

  • Mentor #GoOpen Launch Districts as they design and implement their strategy for transitioning to openly-licensed educational resources.
  • Share the openly-licensed materials they’ve created.

Districts Leading the Way

Broken Arrow Public Schools in Oklahoma is a #GoOpen Ambassador district. They have created several courses which are organized in Google Docs. You can access their materials and add them to your Google Drive. Remember, the hallmark of the term open is that they must be willing to share the materials and allow others to adapt and modify them.

Mark Officer, Executive Director of Secondary Administration at Broken Arrow Public Schools, attributes their success to the #GoOpendedication of the instructional staff who have led the process throughout. He noted that the teaching staff has been empowered by the curation process and that the students have positively responded to the change. So far, there have been around 100 teachers involved in the curation process, and he expects that number to grow to more than 200 by the end of this year. He feels that what these teachers have created is a better product than what they could purchase. Their initiative started at the secondary level and, because of their success, the elementary instructional staff is beginning to curate open educational resources as well.

#GoOpenEl Paso ISD is a #GoOpen Launch district. They have partnered with CK-12 to develop Flexbooks. El Paso has created quite a collection of Flexbooks in all four core subject areas. At the launch of their CK-12 partnership, Tim Holt, Executive Director of Blended Learning, in explaining one of the reasons they are moving to open materials, said, “Instead of us matching our curriculum to a pre-made textbook, we’ve done it the other way. We’ve made the textbook to match our curriculum.”

Teacher-created materials are not new. Teachers have created their own content since they were etching their lessons on the cave wall. How this movement differs is that, with the use of technology, teachers can share their work with a much larger audience and other educators can take their work and adapt it easily to suit their particular academic and instructional goals.

If you are interested in learning more, check out the resources below. If your school or district is already creating educational resources and you are willing to let others modify and reuse them, consider joining the #GoOpen movement by contacting the Department of Education at tech@ed.gov.

Resources for OER

 

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Content AreasEducational Trends

Inspiring OER with Amazon Inspire

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

This blog was updated on October 4, 2016 to include additional resources and information.

“High-quality OER (Open Education Resources) can save teachers significant time and effort,” points out this article at Edutopia, “on resource development and advance student learning inside and outside the classroom. Further, open sharing of resources has the potential to fuel collaboration, encourage the improvement of available materials, and aid in the dissemination of best practices.” Given that OER is increasingly available in education space, representing various “big players” like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft’s OpenEd.com, it’s worth taking a look at new offerings in this space.

What will these services mean for school districts and teachers? And, more important questions linger, such as, “Should teachers and school districts be trying to create their own content when so much is available online already? If not, who curates OER content?”

Let’s explore three current and future sources of open educational resources:

Amazon Announces Inspire

“Where big ideas take-off,” shares a video for Amazon’s new service,  Inspire. You might think a free online lesson plan collection would be passé given that there are many other online lesson plan collections (as well as open educational resources available at no cost), but Amazon Inspire seeks to put a fresh face on digital lesson design, as well as open educational resources.

Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse without charge. Open Educational Resources are different from other resources a teacher may use in that they have been given limited or unrestricted licensing rights. That means they have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights. Source: OER Commons

Amazon Inspire seeks to make free resources, created by teachers and others, available for the purpose of improving learning outcomes. The new system will be searchable by grade level, type, and more. Contributors will be able to review and rate content made available online. Since Inspire is not yet available, teachers and contributors can request early access, and potential organizations can request to collaborate as well. Their invitation to collaborators appears below:

Are you a state, district, or school? An OER provider or a publisher with free content to share? We’ve collaborated with thousands of teachers and dozens of states, districts, and publishers during the private beta of Amazon Inspire. Now it’s your turn. Help us to provide teachers everywhere with access to a large and diverse selection of free digital teaching resources.

Of course, Amazon is neither the first or the last to the OER space.

Google OER Custom Search

Until Amazon’s Inspire OER clearinghouse is ready, be aware that there are ample locations to find OERs. One place that you can look is a Google custom search. For example, a quick search on blended learning yielded these results:

OER

How many of these resources remain current however? Keeping it all updated remains a key obstacle according to JISC’s web site:

Sustainability of OER release is currently a significant issue for institutions around the globe and evidence of benefits must be clarified if resources are to be made available for continued release. (Source: JISC)

If you explore The OER4Schools Professional Learning Resource, you will probably be impressed (as I was) by the breadth and depth of the content available. Now imagine maintaining this content, updating it to reflect the latest information (e.g. Google Forms and Drive updates may not be reflected on this page fast enough to be useful).

As LeiLani Cauthen (@learningcounsel – The Learning Counsel) pointed out recently (paraphrased in my notes below) at a San Antonio, Texas event, teachers are essentially competing against a global network of knowledge workers. Small teams of teachers in their respective classrooms are unable to keep up with the constantly changing flood of content, apps, and information washing over schools in waves.

Digital curriculum and LMS companies are dis-intermediating teachers because there’s no possible way for teachers to design the mobile learning experiences students need at the speed they need to. Teachers are competing against a global network of knowledge. Some district curriculum leaders think they can simply digitize their resources and teach teachers to use a variety of digital apps. But organizing and managing this for each teacher is impossible for them. It’s a never-ending task that teachers have no time for or expertise (most were not taught to be instructional designers of curriculum that is multi-sensory and mobile), and, as such, more information is needed.

OER Commons

Featuring an easy-to-use interface, the OER Commons presents educators
with a variety of open educational resources. As you can see from the results below, there is content available in a variety of areas.OER

 

FormSwift Common Core Lesson Plans

Another resource for creating customized lesson plans is from startup FormSwift. They provide a very nice-looking and easy-to-use template for making an ELA, math, or science lesson plan based on the Common Core standards. The free site allows you to edit a PDF or Word document that can then be printed or emailed in to a supervisor.

Conclusion

Open Educational Resources certainly have great potential for educators, providing content and lessons that teachers can adapt. Yet the question remains. Even though OERs are becoming available, who evaluates these and makes sure they connect to the district’s curricular goals? And do teachers really have the time to curate content coming from multiple vendors?

OER Apps and Resources

  • MERLOT OER Search (iOS) – MERLOT Search provides easy-to-use access to the MERLOT database of 48,000+ higher education resources. MERLOT’s Open Education Resource collection has been curated by subject matter experts, many with comments provided by members who have used them and often with learning exercises attached for use in the classroom.
  • OER Search (iOS) – OER Search provides a quick and easy way to discover high quality open educational resources that are freely available online. Search from 30,000 resources that have been curated by educators from over 300 collections and providers.
  • Creating and Sharing Open Educational Resources (iOS) – This nonlinear collection of multi-touch resource books are designed to support educators who are authoring content and/or guiding learners who are authoring content for publication. This course is designed as a collection of resources to help the teacher and student navigate through open educational resources.
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