Insect Collections

This group is for harvesting and organizing arthropod lesson plans; it's an outgrowth of the ESA Education and Outreach Committee.

OER Commons (Open Educational Resource Commons) is a platform that allows us to use collaborative authoring to collect insect lesson plans. It also has built in evaluation rubrics. The site also has authoring tools for open access resources, including online textbooks. Do you have an orphan project that needs a permanent digital home? You can host it here!

Every resource is tagged with grade levels, and can also be aligned to Next Gen science standards.  It's perfect for what we want to do, and FREE :)

Basic overview of the project timeline:

1. Identification and harvest of arthropod lesson plans that already exist online. 
A key requirement of OER is that resources be FREE to access, and ideally also Creative Commons licensed, so that the materials can be reproduced freely.  You can CC license your work and still require attribution! 

2. Collection of paywall-protected lesson plans or resource documents (from NSTA, etc) in the bibliography.  This is a work around; there are some amazing lesson plans in journals, but they are not open access :(

3. Tagging and evaluation of harvested lesson plans by members of the ESA using OER tools so we can make them easier to find and use for educators. This process also makes lessons available as part of the larger OER library, so helps them be more discoverable by educators. 

4. (Long Term Plan) Once we have a sense of scope, we can use the metadata tagged resources in our own insect education portal, identifying our top picks for different topics. We also can identify what materials are duplicated across universities, and look for standardization/best practices.

What goes in the collection?

See the other disscussion in this folder!  You should definately start by submitting your lesson plans.