A Teacher's Journal #5: Open Educational Resources

After many years of saying "someday," I'm finally enrolled in an Educational Technology Master's Program. My current course requires me to keep a journal to document "connectedness" online. Below is my fifth entry. 

Image: Created in Canva,
marked for public use.

Open Educational Resources or OERs have been around since the dawn of teaching. We, teachers, love to both share and steal, uh utilize great classroom ideas and resources. However, with the Internet, this has become something truly amazing. We can now share ideas, lessons, and even whole units with teachers all over the world. Some are capitalizing on this using sites such as Teachers Pay Teachers to supplement income (and who can blame them). 

Others are taking a different route and openly sharing what they create, some using Creative Commons licensing. According to the NMC Horizon Report (2014), "The goal is that OER materials are freely copiable, freely remixable, and free of barriers to access, cultural sensitivities, sharing, and educational use" (p. 10). Working at a charter school with much flexibility and freedom in my curriculum planning, I have greatly benefitted from these resources. 

Here are just a few out there that are all FREE:

Language Arts

ReadWriteThink: Amazing lessons all supporting language arts. Many are creative and fun. This is an excellent source for teachers K-12.

Social Science

Big History Project: This is a whole curriculum set up with rich activities, videos from specialists, etc. Use it from start to finish for a high level, deep thinking course or pick and choose resources to use. It is well put together and allows you to enroll a whole class. 

Science

NOAA: Climate resources include lessons and tons of data. 

Null Earth: Global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions. Really cool animation that is in almost real time. It helps students understand currents and is beautiful to boot!

NASA Education: Lessons, videos from space stations, inspiration. . . This site has it all for STEM fields!

Technology

Code.org: Free, fun coding lessons that are put together with kids in mind and some serious backers (Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.). 

Common Sense Education: Digital Citizenship lesson plans from Common Sense Media. This is a fantastic resource along with their game, Digital Compass (also free). These resources help teachers with everything from cyberbullying to properly using resources online.

Multiple Subjects

Teachers Pay Teacher: Free area. There are hundreds of resources here that altruistic teachers have posted for free use. Check it out!

Teachers Give Teachers: Set up by teachers including Lisa Highfill (who is amazing to hear speak, by the way). This is set up to share hyperdocs (lessons set up in a series of links in one document). They are excellent!