There is a flood of stimulus money coming into education this summer, including a substantial amount for ed tech. This is one-time funding that is to be spent quickly, but in a way that yields significant, long-term gains.

I can think of no better way to use such funding than to develop high-quality, open-licensed curriculum resources that would be available for free use worldwide. Teachers and students in one-to-one laptop programs across the country could benefit from this content.

A more detailed concept paper of this idea is available here.

If you are with a school district that would be interested in a collaboration on such a project, please contact me at karen at k12opened dot com.

With more and more great educational podcasts out there, it’s getting hard to choose which to use in the classroom. One thing that sets some podcasts apart are those that provide teacher’s guide and lesson plans for the classroom.

Here are some podcasts with teacher’s resources that you might want to check out:

The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation – Podcast Activity Guide (More Smithsonian podcasts are also available here.)

NPR’s Science Friday podcast – Kids’ Connection site with a wealth of resources including curriculum activities and standards correlation

Some podcasts, like the ESL Podcast, have more extensive learning guides that are available at additional cost. A sample is included here.

If you have lesson plans for using podcasts in the classroom that you’d like to share, let us know. We hope to post a collection of these in the future.

[Image: Reprinted with permission from ClipArt.com; copyrighted property of JupiterImages used with permission under license.]

Creative Commons today announced the formation of a new division, ccLearn. This group is “dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources” and has a stated mission “to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.”

That’s very exciting. If you’ve heard me speaklately, you know that I am a very big advocate of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. I believe that this movement coupled with massive collaboration has the opportunity to reshape education by providing valuable resources needed to differentiate instruction.

Stay tuned for more info on this as it develops.

As a part of the fun I’m having contributing to Wikijunior (part of Wikibooks, offering free, open content textbooks), I’ve taken an animal alphabet book there and made video and ebook versions of it.

They’re available for viewing and download here.

There are versions for the desktop, various handhelds, iPods, and even a Mobipocket ebook version. (One of the not-fun things about creating video is all the format issues. I think we’ve put about everything up here, but let me know if anything’s been missed.)

If you haven’t ventured into the world of contributing to wikis, Wikijunior is a great place to start. (Try the Human Body book or Ancient Civilizations.) The more people who contribute to these free “copyleft” resources, the better they will be. If you’re not sure how to start, try something small like fixing an error or just adding a couple sentences. It’s a lot of fun!

Some quick thoughts from a session on Classroom 2.0 …

- With wikis, some people are hesitant to add because they think they might be “wrong.”

- School 2.o was too radical of an idea for many. [My note: I started out there for just that reason; I was looking for a group with some ideas that were "out there." It was a little lonely though. I moved over to Classroom 2.0, but sometimes find that much of the discussion there is not really 2.0-related.]

- There may be a need for a more database-type approach for creating/storing/accessing 2.0 curriculum resources that’s more structured than a wiki.

* There needs to be a set of tags that identify educational grade level, content area, and even national standards correlation. [My note: This is a really big idea, I think. There are so many great resources out there, but there needs to be consistent tags so they can be accessed easier.]

- There was a discussion of issues related to blocking of Google video, YouTube, etc. If more people licensed content under Creative Commons though, this content could be “harvested” off of these sites and put on other more “education-friendly” sites.

- Relevant links: Classroom 2.0 ning, School 2.0 ning, Classroom 2.0 wiki, Creative Commons licensing

There are two more new free, Open Source curriculum content resources coming on line:

Schools Without Limts

OER Commons

As these repositories get fleshed out, look for an upcoming review in my blog. In the meantime, if you have a great lesson or curriculum resource that you are willing to share, post it!

In celebration of February as African American History Month, K12 Handhelds presents a FREE handheld curriculum unit on African American history. This unit includes an ebook with historic photos, profiles, a timeline, a linked glossary, and more; a virtual field trip to significant sites in African American history; web clippings of profiles, first person accounts, and more; a quiz, and even a handheld calendar of historical events for every day in February!

If you have these materials already, make sure to download the new interactive ebook in Mobipocket. It includes quizzes embedded right in the ebook.

You can download this now here.

Open Source content is all the rage and provides a great resource for educators worldwide. I’ve been thinking recently that there is a real opportunity for some kind of curriculum wiki — a place to gather all the great curriculum resources that people develop and are willing to share. And just when I’m thinking of this, here is one…. Curriki.

Curriki is a new resource that provides free Open Source lessons, assessments, resources and textbooks. This site is hosted by Global Education and Learning Community, a project of Scott McNealy and Sun Microsystems. They’ve assembed a heavy hitting team of managers and advisers for this project.

The service is brand new, and so the offerings at this point are a bit spotty. The great thing about wikis though is how quickly they can grow and prosper. So consider this an invitation to submit your favorite lesson plans and resources. I’ll do the same.