OER Commons

Last July I wrote about how the non profit organisation,Creative Commons, was providing us with a solution with regard to reusing other people's creativity responsibly. Creative Commons,introduced in 2008, provides us with a multitude of royalty free sites and its licencing allows us to reuse content and   share our own creativity with the rest of the world, legally.

In the same spirit,OER Commons was  created in 2007 and it provides teaching and learning materials that you may  freely use and reuse without charge legally.

The evergrowing worldwide OER movement is rooted in the idea that access to high quality education should be available to all.Its an alternative to rising costs of education and also gives us the opportunity of  trying new ways to teach and learn.

OER (Open Education Resources) has over 120 major content partners
Some examples of OER Materials are:

• MOOCS (Massive Online Open Courses).These courses are offered freely online by leading universities including Standford,Harvard and Edinburgh.
• Khan Academy
• Gooru
• TED- Ed
• Watch Know Learn
• School Tube

Gooru

Gooru  is a free search engine for learning and a OER.Teachers and students are able to search for rich collections of multimedia resources,digital textbooks,videos,games and quizzes that have alll been vetted by learning professionals.It is currently an excellent resource for Science,Maths and Environment Science teachers as it has a fantatstic library of multimedia resources for these subjects.
What is also brilliant about Gooru is that teachers can customise "playlists" of resources for their students.
Once registered, creating your own ‘play-list’ or ‘Collection’ is an easy search, drag and drop process. Teachers are also able to include key vocabulary and learning objectives in the collection overview, and are able to add voice narration to direct students or highlight points within the collection.

The collaborative nature of the site allows teachers to use and adapt collections that other professionals have created and shared. Gooru encourages users to share; it is part of the growing OER (Open Education Resources) movement.

Top Tools For Learning

Once again Jane Hart has compiled a list of the top 100 tools for education based on the votes of over 500 professionals.The top tool for the 4th year running is Twitter with Youtube (2nd) and Google Docs/Drive(3rd) retaining their places for the third year in succession.In terms of trends,this year's list has seen an increase in the popularity of tools to "organise" digital resources (Scoopit, Pinterest) as well as note taking tools (Evernote, MS Onenote)
To see the list access Jane Hart's  Slideshare below

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2012 from Jane Hart

Top Apps for 2012

eSchool News Online also has just released its new list of best education apps for 2012. Rated by teachers they range from maths games, 3D imaging of the periodic table  and special education apps.To view the list click on this link

Treasure Explorer

Teachers of Australian History might like to take a look at a new creative networking tool  called Treasure Explorer .It is an educational website where students and teachers can contribute and engage with Australian history.It also provides an online resource to find out more about the objects,archives and stories represented in the Natioanl Library of Auustralia's Treasures Gallery.

Improving All the Time

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you haven't accessed Scootle for some time you might not be aware of the Improve online interactive formative assessment tool which has been developed by Education Services Australia.This tool can be used by both teachers and students to improve learning. Your students join classess via your Improve Teacher PIN code.You can create customised test  and quizzes for students, and access Naplan literacy and numeracy tests as well.
Using the Question Creator, you can create five different types of questions:

• multiple choice with images or text
• multiple response
• short and long free-text response

Follow up learning resources can also be attached to your questions by selecting a resource from Scootle
After students  complete a test or quiz,Improve provides each of them with a report on their test results and provides them with individual learning paths based on their responses,suggesting one or more activities to improve their learning.
As all tests are automatically saved you can monitor student progress and idenify areas for improvement.

To access Improve go onto the Scootle website and select Use Improve from the menu bar.                     

The Flipped Classroom

You have probably heard alot of talk about the "Flipped Classroom" this year and wondered what  it is all about.In a nutshell, it is when  teacher lectures are done outside of class time, so that more time in class can  be spent by the teacher  working with students on learning activities.Flipping the classroom  changes the mix of what is done inside the classroom and what is done outside the classroom.It allows teachers to become facilitators of learning and move away from "the sage on the stage" approach to teaching.The clever and creative video below will explain the strategy in more detail.




Teachers can set up their own flipped classrooms by creating their own videos, podcasts and vodcasts and posting them to a blog,wiki or school portal.(the mobile learning environment)  There are a variety of creating tools to do this but it does take time and planning. A good way of "dipping your toe into the water"  however, is to have your students watch lessons that have been already created by other educators.These can be found on the open source platforms below.
Khan Academy
You Tube For Schools
Ted-Ed
School Tube
Watch Know Learn
Teacher Tube