10 Ways to Support OERs via Social Media

March 19, 2010 by Curriki

A colleague of mine recently sent me the Mashable post, “#10Ways to Support Charities Through Social Media”. As a follow-up, I thought it would be fun to create a list specific to Open Education Resources (OERs). So, here it goes…

1)    Write a blog post about OERs—If you find a great free and open education resource on sites like Curriki, OER Commons and Flat World Knowledge, write a short post about it! Teachers are always looking for great free classroom content online that has been endorsed by a fellow educator!

2)    Share OER stories with friends—If you’ve written a blog about OERs, post a link to the entry on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, or Google Buzz. Or, just post a link to the resource itself. Curriki makes this process easy! Open any resource on Curriki and click on the “Share” button at the top of the page. This will allow you to share the gift of free lessons with your social networks in a click!

3)    Follow OERs on Twitter and Facebook—We tweet @Curriki. To find other OER tweeters, go to Twitter Search and type in #OER. Many OERs have Facebook fan pages as well.

4)    Support OERs on Awareness Hubs—Several websites have popped up to support non-profits in their work. Take a look at Facebook Causes, iGive and iSearch to start!

5)    Find Volunteer Opportunities—OERs are always looking for enthusiastic educators to share their knowledge with classrooms around the world. When you visit an OER like Curriki, Connexions or FreeReading, most have explicit information on how you can donate lessons, expertise and time from the comfort of your own classroom or home. Check out the Curriki donate page to start!

6)    Embed an OER Badge on Your Site—Feel good about connecting teachers in need of high quality online content with great OERs by putting a widget or badge on your blog, website, Facebook page and more.

7)    Organize a Tweetup—Meet OER fans offline at events like the upcoming Communia Workshop in Turkey or the ISTE Conference in Denver. Or, create an event in your hometown. For tips on how to organize a successful tweetup, check out Mashable’s guide to tweetups.

8)    Talk about your love of OERs on Video—Then post the video on YouTube, Vimeo and other online video services. Even though the OER movement is growing stronger by the second, many people don’t know about it. Connect great teachers with great free content. Spread the word about OERs!

9)    Petition for the use and creation of OERs in your School Districts—I am always surprised when I meet with schools districts unaware about OERs (especially the cost savings of OERs!) or districts that don’t allow teachers to put district-created lesson plans online open source (Wouldn’t a teacher in Cambodia benefit from a math resource from your district or county and vise versa?! Were tax dollars used to create that content?! Hmm!). Use tools like Petition Online and Twitition to rally for the use and sharing of OERs within your district and beyond!

10) Organize an Online Event—Invite your friends to a tweet-a-thon and tell them to tweet great OERs to the world during a specific time period with a hashtags like #OER or #IloveOERs!

Social media is the perfect tool for spreading great ideas. Tell us how you are using social media to support the OER movement by posting a comment on this blog or by sending us a tweet @Curriki.

From one OER fan to another,

Anna Batchelder

Curriki International Consultant

www.Curriki.org

Note: The image above was created by Fred Cavazza and is licensed under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

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Curriki Content Mondays: Focus on Social Studies

March 15, 2010 by Curriki

Dear Social Studies Educators,

Given your interest in history, civics and world affairs, we thought you would enjoy the following highlights from the Curriki Social Studies Collection. For more featured Social Studies content, check out our Focus on Social Studies page.

Resources for Elementary School

  • Knowing Native Americans by teacher Melissa Webber: This unit will introduce students to Native Americans. It will provide an overview of various Native American groups in different geographical locations across America. The unit will progress into an in-depth study of the Wampanoag Indian Tribe, including an examination of daily family life and how the tribe met their basic needs. Furthermore, the unit will cover the Wampanoag’s role in helping the Pilgrims and celebrating the first Thanksgiving.
  • A Matter of Chocolate by Curriki member Sarah Wostbrock: A Social Studies and Science integrated thematic unit on the history and chemistry of chocolate, this comprehensive interdisciplinary resource promises to be highly engaging. Students will participate in the preparation of various treats as they explore physical and chemical changes. Students begin classifying and graphing from the first lesson and use a variety of other scientific process skills throughout the rest of the 5-lesson unit. Students will read “The Story of Chocolate” and be responsible for presentations on the role of chocolate in various cultures throughout history.

For Middle School

  • Social Studies 7 (World History) by educator Robert Lucas: This is an excellent collection of resources for teaching World History. There are units with detailed lessons plans and valuable materials to support each activity. Each unit is filled with a variety of activities including mapping, writing, debates, readings, movies, skits, quizzes, final assessments and much more. Some of the highlights include learning about Independence in India through watching the movie Gandhi and participating in a Socratic seminar and studying about Empires by working with small groups on a layered curriculum activity.
  • Middle Ages WebQuest by IB educator David Carpenter: This WebQuest on the Middle Ages is designed as a complete unit of study. The resource outlines the definition of a WebQuest and gives many links to other resources related for research. Students are asked to research a role from medieval society and to play that role in classroom reenactments. Teachers will find a vast array of useful ideas and creative avenues for academic exploration of this complex time period.

For High School

  • Turkey: Global Studies Units and Lesson Plans by the World Affairs Council: This is an excellent collection of resources for teaching about The Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire. The lessons are geared towards increasing subject matter understanding and developing important academic skills. Each activity is full of accurate content, thoughtful instructional strategies, and great handouts. Some of the highlights include an introductory activity on primary sources which has students think about what they might include in a time capsule, a web “scavenger hunt” about Constantinople/Istanbul, and a mapping activity examining military conquests under Suleiman.
  • Entrepreneurship Learning Activities by the Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education CEE: This resource contains a variety of activities and lessons that aim to teach student about entrepreneurship. Make sure to check out What’s In It for Me? and Bagel Business Basics!

Have a great Social Studies lesson you’d like to share? Post your lesson on Curriki and then send us the link on Twitter (@Curriki). Selected lessons will be featured in future blog posts and added to the Focus on Social Studies page highlights.

Sincerely,

@Curriki

www.Curriki.org

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OER Friday: US National Education Technology Plan Supports OER

March 12, 2010 by Curriki

The March 5, 2010 release of the US National Education Technology Plan (NETP) draft was music to Curriki’s eyes! Included in the NETP is a vision of 21st century learning with goals and recommendations presented under the categories of learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity.

Scroll to page 56 of the document and you will see the following shout out to the OER movement:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are an important element of an infrastructure for learning. OER come in forms ranging from podcasts to digital libraries to textbooks, games, and courses. They are freely available to anyone over the web.

Educational organizations started making selected educational materials freely available shortly after the appearance of the web in the mid-1900s. But MIT’s decision to launch the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative to make the core content from all its courses available online in 2000 gave the OER movement a credible start (Smith, 2009). Other universities joined the OCW Consortium, and today there are more than 200 members, each of which has agreed to make at least 10 courses available in open form.

Many of these materials are available not just to individuals enrolled in courses, but to anyone who wants to use them. The power of OER is demonstrated by the fact that nearly half the downloads of MIT’s OpenCourseWare are by individual self-directed learners, not students taking courses for credit (Maxwell, online presentation for the NETP Technical Working Group, 2009).

Equally important to the OER movement was the emergence of the Creative Commons, an organization that developed a set of easy-to-use licenses whereby individuals or institutions could maintain ownership of their creative products while giving others selected rights. These rights range from allowing use of a work in its existing form for noncommercial purposes to the right to repurpose, remix, and redistribute for any purpose…

The OER movement begun in higher education should be more fully adopted throughout our K-16 public education system. For example, high-quality digital textbooks for standard courses such as algebra can be created by experts and funded by consortia arrangements and then made freely available as a public good. Open textbooks could significantly reduce the cost of education in primary and secondary as well as higher education. Textbooks constitute a significant portion of the government’s K-12 budget as well as the student-borne cost of higher education.

To download the NETP, click here. Thanks to Creative Commons for bringing our attention to this important news. To start browsing the Curriki K-12 OER collection, click here.

Between the NETP and the Horizon Report, looks like 2010 might just be the year of OER!

@Curriki

www.Curriki.org

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March Survey: Teacher Professional Development

March 10, 2010 by Curriki

Professional development (PD) is the focus of this month’s Curriki survey and we want to hear what you have to say!

  • Do you participate in regular PD?
  • What PD topics are of interest to you?
  • Do you prefer online or face-to-face PD?
  • What makes a great trainer/professional developer?
  • Would you be interested in participating in a Curriki Institute to make the most of Curriki content and tools?

To participate in our 5 minute survey, click here. To see responses from past Curriki surveys on topics such as smart boards, national standards, and more, click here.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about PD!

@Curriki

www.Curriki.org

The above image is by Olivander and is made available under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

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In Celebration of Music in Our Schools Month

March 8, 2010 by Curriki

In celebration of Music in Our Schools Month, click on over to the Listen for Life “Travels with Music” collection on Curriki.

Listen for Life (LFL) is a global family of music listeners, performers, teachers, producers, and sociologists — all working together to preserve, encourage, and develop music cultures worldwide. LFL strives to make music a language of cross-cultural communication and thus promote diversity and understanding towards a path of peace. Travels with Music is a program produced by LFL that uses video profiles of master musicians from various traditions to introduce and to celebrate the cultures that the musicians represent.

Take a virtual fieldtrip to Senegal by grooving to the beats of master drummer Aziz Faye. Learn about the Javanese gamelan and Philippine kulintang via a click to Southeast Asia. Teach your students about the music of China, Bulgaria, South America and more!

@Curriki

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OER Friday: Lessons lessons everywhere, but how do I effectively use them?

March 5, 2010 by Curriki

With nearly 35,000 free and open educational resources on Curriki alone, not to mention the millions more offered by sites like OER Commons and Connexions, the OER movement is in full swing. This means that the challenge teachers face today is not so much, “Does high quality free content exist for my classroom online?” but rather, “How do I find it quickly and use it effectively?”

Thanks to a generous grant from the Hearst Foundation, educators can now access free professional development on Curriki that teaches them to effectively make the most of OERs in their classroom.

Created by six distinguished professors from around the United States (Brett Shelton, David Wiley, Cynthia Gautreau, Chris Penny, Dave Fontaine, Michael Searson), the course is composed of the following units:

To get started with the course, click here. To learn more about the course, the professors behind the course, and how it was put together, visit “Integrating Open Education Resources in the Classroom”.

We welcome you to share this course with any teacher interested in using the Internet to find and teach high quality free and open content!

Happy OER Friday!

@Curriki

www.Curriki.org

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