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Teaching Channel is a video showcase-on the Internet and TV-of inspiring and effective teaching practices in America's schools. We have a rapidly growing community of registered members who trade ideas and share inspiration from each other. With the help of the Tch community, our mission is to revolutionize how teachers learn, connect, and inspire each other to improve the outcomes for all K-12 students across America. In order to accomplish this mission, we have three simple goals, all of them reliant on input from teachers: * Build professional learning resources that teachers want * Deepen and improve opportunities for teacher learning * Elevate and celebrate teachers in our society Share This Video Our videos are produced by a unique team of professionals-a collaborative effort between video production experts, education advisors, and the classroom teachers themselves. We should point out that Teaching Channel does not determine or influence the content taught in our videos. Our video library offers educators a wide range of subjects for grades K-12. The videos also include information on alignment with Common Core State Standards and ancillary material for teachers to use in their own classrooms. Teaching Channel Presents, a weekly one-hour program featuring Tch videos, airs on PBS stations in nearly 75 million homes across the United States. A non-profit organization, Teaching Channel launched publicly in June 2011."

"Guidelines for Professional Development of Online Teachers Based on the SREB Standards for Quality Online Teaching Providing quality professional development for online teachers is extremely important to ensure ongoing quality teaching and learning - just as it is for teachers in traditional classrooms. The professional development of online teachers should be well-planned and organized to meet the specific academic and instructional needs of online teachers."

"oday's education system includes ingrained practices, including policy and decades-old methods, that prevent schools from moving to competency-based models. Solutions to this problem include: Creating and making available educational resources on competency-based learning. These resources might be best practices, rubrics or tools, or research. Convening a coalition of League of Innovative Schools districts that are working to build successful competency-based models. Creating a technical solution for flexible tracking of competencies and credits. Problem No. 2: Leadership doesn't always support second-order change, and those in potential leadership roles, such as teachers and librarians, aren't always empowered to help effect change. Solutions to this problem include: Promoting League of Innovative Schools efforts to enable second-order change leadership Creating a framework, to be used in professional development, that would target and explain second-order change leadership discussions Schedule panel discussions about second-order change leadership Problem No. 3: Communities and cultures are resistant to change, including technology-based change Solutions to this problem include: Identifying new and engaging ways to share cutting-edge and tech-savvy best practices with school and district stakeholders and community members Involve business leaders in technology-rich schools and create school-business partnerships Look to influential organizations to spearhead national ed-tech awareness campaigns Problem No. 4: Education budgets aren't always flexible enough to support the cost, sustainability, or scalability of innovations Solutions to this problem include: Build relationships with local businesses and career academies, and create incentives for companies to hire students, in order to create a revenue stream for schools Look to competitive pricing and creative solutions Leaders must not be afraid t

"n order to provide enough time for teachers to work together effectively, such models frequently require schools to overhaul their schedules or arrange for a delayed-start time (Sawchuk, Nov. 10, 2010b; Sawchuk, March 3, 2010). Such practices can be paired with other opportunities for deepening practice, including observing fellow teachers and working one-on-one with classroom-based "coaches," or content experts (Keller, 2007). Other variations of site-based professional development include the Japanese practice of lesson study, in which a teacher creates and teaches a model lesson. The lesson is observed and sometimes videotaped so that colleagues can analyze the lesson's strengths and weaknesses and determine how to strengthen the lesson (Viadero, 2004). Hard data on which professional-development models lead to better teaching are difficult to come by. In essence, professional development relies on a two-part transfer of knowledge: It must inculcate in teachers new knowledge and skills such that they change their behavior, and those changes must subsequently result in improved student mastery of subject matter. Unsurprisingly, the complex nature of those transactions renders the field of professional development a challenging one to study. Much of the research conducted on professional development continues to be descriptive rather than quantitative (Sawchuk, Nov. 10, 2010c). "

72 Tips for Using Media to Engage and Teach"

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license. These resources may be used free of charge , distributed without restriction , and modified without permission. In 2012, the Washington State Legislature passed Engrossed Second Substitute House Bill 2337 that directed the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to create a collection of openly licensed courseware aligned with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and conduct an awareness campaign to inform school di stricts about these resources. The Legislature saw this as an opportunity to both "reduce the expenses that districts would otherwise incur in purchasing these materials" and "provide districts and students with a broader selection of materials, and materi als that are more up - to - date." As a part of th is legislative mandate , OSPI conducted a review of OER in high school mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) that built on the work of the 2013 WA OER R eview . Teams evaluated full - course Geometry/Integrated Math 2 and units in 9 th - 10 th grade ELA. In addition, an OER Algebra 1 course unavailable for review in 2013 was examined. The review process, conducted durin g February and March , 201 4 , made use of existing review instruments designed to gauge alignment with the C CSS and overall OER quality . Minor revisions to the 2013 process were informed by feedback from the first cohort of reviewers. The results from this r eview enable educators and content developers to tap into the most powerful feature of OER : the ability to freely adapt and redistribute materials ."

"Essential Principles of High-Quality Online Teaching: Guidelines for Evaluating K-12 Online Teachers "

"This guide is organized in two main sections. Section I provides our working definition of distance education and anatomizes its many modes and models, dissecting their strengths and weaknesses in terms of instructional quality and effectiveness. Section II focuses on methods, collating best practices and lessons learned about teaching and learning from successful global distance education models. The guide also contains a glossary of terms, a reference section for further Web-based information on distance learning programs and approaches, and an extensive bibliography of the sources cited within the guide. Where available, we provide website addresses for every program discussed here. We also provide the URLs of websites that offer free content, but not those of commercial websites, which can typically be accessed online by searching for them by name."

"The framework takes three perspectives of digital badges (motivation, pedagogy, and credential) and correlates each of these perspectives with three different concepts of the open movement (production, access, and appropriation). "Open badges represent an intriguing way to design, structure and reward learning through digital media, open systems and online networks, say the authors, "…[and] when designing an overall system it will be critical to identify and explicitly design for the potential obstacles or areas of opportunity…in this frame, the goals, implementation, and consequences attached to badges are linked to the concerns of teaching, learning and structuring education systems to enable these practices.""

"Questions of quality in repositories of open educational resources: a literature review" Javiera Atenasa,b* and Leo Havemannc Abstract Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials which are freely available and openly licensed. Repositories of OER (ROER) are platforms that host and facilitate access to these resources. ROER should not just be designed to store this content - in keeping with the aims of the OER movement, they should support educators in embracing open educational practices (OEP) such as searching for and retrieving content that they will reuse, adapt or modify as needed, without economic barriers or copyright restrictions. This paper reviews key literature on OER and ROER, in order to understand the roles ROER are said or supposed to fulfil in relation to furthering the aims of the OER movement. Four themes which should shape repository design are identified, and the following 10 quality indicators (QI) for ROER effectiveness are discussed: featured resources; user evaluation tools; peer review; authorship of the resources; keywords of the resources; use of standardised metadata; multilingualism of the repositories; inclusion of social media tools; specification of the creative commons license; availability of the source code or original files. These QI form the basis of a method for the evaluation of ROER initiatives which, in concert with considerations of achievability and long-term sustainability, should assist in enhancement and development. Keywords: open educational resources; open access; open educational practice; repositories; quality assurance "

Shared by Liz. Liz, are there particular pages, content, or design elements that we can take from them/this?

Intel Case Study with Ed Tech Leaders Online Barbara Treacy suggested I read this and consider sharing it with prospective DOE collaborators as an investment tool. More later.