Howard County Public School's Introduction to OER
Welcome
As Howard County Public School System advances its open educational resource (OER) adoption and implementation plan, ISKME is pleased to support this effort moving forward. ISKME brings a comprehensive OER toolset and immersive professional learning program to assist educators in enhancing their capacities to use, evaluate, curate, and create OER. Leveraging its teaching and learning network and digital library, OER Commons (oercommons.org) launched in 2007, ISKME advances collaboration and continuous improvement of high-quality curriculum.
This is the first of three custom module trainings that will provide participants with an introduction to OER practice and the value add, highlighting successful state and district use cases. Followed by a demonstration and discussion of how to navigate OER Commons and create collaborative workflows to identify resources, assess their quality using rubrics, and organize materials for use. Participants will get an opportunity to practice using OER tools and begin to design their plans for OER implementation, specific to their immediate OER needs. An important outcome for educators will be a shared understanding of OER practice and specific next steps for OER adoption in their work.
We have designed these modules to first spark the learner's interest in the topics covered and then dig deeper into the content through presentations, storytelling, and demonstrations of the tools. We will offer opportunities for learners to practice exploring the resources and tools, and reflect on how they might use them in their work.
Optional pre-activities:
To participate in group discussions during the REFLECT sections you will need to create a login and join the Howard County Public School System's Group. Please see instructions below
CREATE A PROFILE on OER Commons to be able to contribute to the discussions in our group, and to save and organize resources. Click "Register Now!", fill in the necessary information, and click register. You will receive a confirmation email with a link to log in.
JOIN OUR GROUP Once you've logged in successfully, join the Howard County Public School System's Group by clicking "Join This Group"
OER Game Changers
Let's kick off this module by hearing from some of the members of our community who are utilizing OER to transform teaching and learning.
WATCH the video below and get to know some OER game changers.
WATCH the video below to learn about how a group of educators from around the world collaborated with OER to teach climate change.
REFLECT: Based on what your current understanding, how might you describe OER to your colleagues? Reply here
*Reminder: you will need to be logged in to OER Commons and join the Howard County Public School Group to reply to the discussion.
OER Overview
Join ISKME's Training Team as we explore the what, why, and how of OER, highlighting use cases that have successfully adopted and implemented OER in their districts and states. We'll also provide an overview of our OER Commons digital library and collaborative tools for discovery, evaluation, curation, and authoring.
OER defined. We believe OER is both a noun and a verb.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
- noun: freely available teaching and learning and learning resources that reside in the public domain or have an open license, like Creative Commons (see below), that allows educators to use, share, and in some cases remix to best meet their needs. The types of open educational resources include full courses, textbooks, videos, lesson plans, games, simulations, and readings.
- verb: to shift teaching practice and expand educator's roles as collaborators, curators, instructional designers, and leaders.
WATCH the OER Overview Part 1 presentation below.
WATCH the OER Overview Part 2 presentation below.
PRACTICE Click on one of our Network Hubs that interests you and explore what's included in the Hub. Feel free to take a deeper look at the Hub resource collections by clicking on the topics that stand out to you.
Hub Highlights:
- Our Common Core Hub has resource collections aligned to Common Core ELA and math standards, as well as professional learning resources for teachers looking to prove their teaching of the instructional shifts.
- One of our newest Hubs is STEM Literacy and it includes the latest news, research and updates from ISKME's STEM Projects; Groups that are collaborating to build STEM Literacy; videos of STEM educators describing their OER work; templates for creating text-based reading in STEM inquiry; and STEM learning resource collections.
REFLECT Now that you have a deeper understanding and have had an opportunity to explore some OER, let's return to our discussion around what OER means to us. Read through the comments that were shared earlier and select one that you would like to add to. In your reply consider clarifying how OER is impacting teaching and learning and include any links you found while exploring the network hubs. Reply to a comment here
Next Modules
Our next module will focus on OER Discovery and is aimed at supporting effective search and quality evaluation strategies to identify and evaluate OER relevant to desired use. We will get an opportunity to search using keywords that describe content gap areas of high need and refine orr search results to OER that we can assess and use. Rubrics for quality evaluation will be shared to help cultivate criteria for improving our teaching and learning resources.
The third module will explore OER Curation and present best practices and recommendations for curating high quality content, showcasing state and district examples. We will demonstrate tools for saving and organizing OER in private and shared groups. Then, we will have time to practice using the tools to curate OER for immediate use in the classroom.