Group items tagged

"The Open Educational Resources Research Hub (OER Research Hub) provides a focus for research, designed to give answers to the overall question 'What is the impact of OER on learning and teaching practices?' and identify the particular influence of openness. We do this by working in collaboration with projects across four education sectors (K12, college, higher education and informal) extending a network of research with shared methods and shared results. By the end of this research we will have evidence for what works and when, but also established methods and instruments for broader engagement in researching the impact of openness on learning."

The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. This is the LearningSpace, where you'll find hundreds of free study units, each with a discussion forum. Study independently at your own pace or join a group and use the free learning tools to work with others. Links to tools and discussion forums in many content areas.

"Abstract: The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning. Author Name(s): Jon Mott David Wiley"

"What is BigBlueButton ? BigBlueButton is an open source project that is built on over fourteen open source components to create an integrated web conferencing system that runs on mac, unix, or PC computers. In the true sense of open source, we invite you to try out and participate in our project."

"Programming is magic. It's the ability to create things from pure imagination. We started CodeCombat to give learners the feeling of wizardly power at their fingertips by using typed code. "As it turns out, that enables them to learn faster too. WAY faster. It's like having a conversation instead of reading a manual. We want to bring that conversation to every school and to every student, because everyone should have the chance to learn the magic of programming. "CodeCombat is a community project,with hundreds of players volunteering to create levels, contribute to our code to add features, fix bugs, playtest, and even translate the game into 50 languages so far. Employees, contributors and the site gain by sharing ideas and pooling effort, as does the open source community in general. The site is built on numerous open source projects, and we are open sourced to give back to the community and provide code-curious players a familiar project to explore and experiment with. Anyone can join the CodeCombat community! "

The Open English series. Lessons in teaching English explained through short videos. Excellent ideas that can be adapted to many different levels of student.

"Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout who became the richest man in the world, believes that foundations can step in where markets fail. Higher education should cost less, produce more graduates, and better serve low-income students, the Gates thinking goes. Colleges cannot count on more public money to fix their problems. Instead, better data and openness are part of the solution, to do things like measure the "value" added by each institution. So is technology: Among the foundation's investments are projects to test how massive open online courses, or MOOCs, could change introductory and remedial classes." Thought-provoking: what is the real purpose of education? Does Gates' vision focus too much on completing a degree, rather than the educational experience?

"#Edchat The purpose of this site is to convert the inspiring and thought-provoking discussion from the weekly Twitter #edchat into real change. Open, collaborative, focused discussion can open and expand minds. But let's not stop there- let's harness this wisdom of the many to crowdsource possible solutions to some of the major issues that are uncovered..." You can join the #edchat discussion by joining the wiki and posting your profile to the Who are We? page. Then vote on weekly topics and follow the discussion through Twitter at #edchat. This is a great example of how a growing community of educators are creating their own professional development online through rich technology resources.

A detailed guide to the history, description, tools and tips on massive Open Online Courses. This wiki is open for further contributions.

"Back in August I shared an infographic featuring search strategies that every student can use. Yesterday, Vicki Davis posted a great companion to that infographic. Vicki shared this Google Search Modifiers Poster (link opens a PDF). Many of the modifiers featured in the poster can also be used by opening the advanced search menu in Google and making search choices. " Both the sites mentioned here and the links below the short article will be helpful in getting your students to use more productive search terms. T/H R. Byrne

"An Open Resource on Digital Literacy for Educators, Teachers and Schools" This site has links to ways to practice digital literacy, teacher, example of practice, etc.

Open source content and animations for teachers

"Teachers helping teachers. Helping one another use Web technology to teach better. OpenCourse.org hosts virtual communities developing, evaluating and using open, non-proprietary learning objects in their discipline. Opencourse.org is a free collaboration platform for educators."

Open source training materials for African development --- accessible anywhere.

IRRODL is a refereed e-journal to advance research, theory and best pratice in open and distance learning.\n--EHS

This is a treasure of free educational resources, especially for video.

Speaks to "three of the main concerns I've heard you mention about technology in schools." Might be useful ammunition to use with tech-fearing or non-using teachers in your school.

"DLIST is a cross-institutional, subject-based, open access digital archive for the Information Sciences, including Archives and Records Management, Library and Information Science, Information Systems, Museum Informatics, and other critical information infrastructures."

"VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols." For Windows-based PCs.

"Tynker is a new computing platform designed specifically to teach children computational learning and programming skills in a fun and imaginative way. Tynker is inspired by Scratch from MIT. It is a completely browser-based implementation written using Open Web standards such as Javascript, HTML5, CSS3 and does not use Flash. "Tynker's language extensions, built-in physics engine, character editors and other tools make it fun and easy for kids to unleash their creativity. Schools love Tynker because it offers them an easy to use cloud-hosted system for delivering a customized Computer Science course across multiple grades with a ready to use curriculum, classroom management and more. Tynker is the platform of choice at many leading schools - see what educators are saying." This looks like an interesting, creative way to unleash students' curiosity. I'm assuming it's for younger kids, but older students may enjoy it too.