Engaging your students in creating standards-based projects is a great way to differentiate instruction.

But what to do when your students want to rip their favorite CDs to include music in their project? If you are posting the work online, this probably doesn’t fall under “fair use,” and it is important to model good copyright adherence with our students.

Creative Commons and open music to the rescue! There is now a wealth of open-licensed music that you and your students can use in your projects.

I love the sites ccMixter (contemporary; note that there is a small amount of music here with “adult language” but this site is not blocked in most schools) and MusOpen (classical) for this, but if you’d like to give students a little more limited selection of music to streamline the time they spend on it, we’ve set up this page with a limited selection of open-licensed music that you can use for free and legally for any student work.

Make sure to have your students attribute the source for any works they use, including music. For these music files, just right-click the mp3 file and view properties to see the source and license details.

Enjoy! And if there are any particular types of music you’d like to see added, let us know.

(cross-posted from K12 Open Ed)

Moodle glossaries are great, and there are so many ways to use them. Content can include everything from vocabulary to FAQs to fact-of-the-day to picture story starters. You can build them yourself as a teacher or have students build them. Glossaries can be displayed as a regular glossary type list, or you can auto-link words to glossary entries or display a random glossary block.

Here’s a new tool to make your use of Moodle glossaries even easier. The Kids Open Dictionary glossary builder now has an auto-export to Moodle! (And this resource is completely public domain.)

Here are the quick instructions.

1. In the dictionary, click Glossary builder.
2. Enter your list of glossary words separated by commas. Click build.
3. Check the resulting definitions. If there is more than one definition for a word, put a check mark next to the definition you want to include. If a word has no definition, you will need to add it. When you are done, click the Moodle button.
   
4. Right-click the “Click here to download your glossary button” link, and save the file somewhere (e.g. your desktop).
5. Go to your Moodle course. If you haven’t already, turn editing on and create a glossary by selecting Glossary from the “Add an activity” drop-down menu. (More on Moodle glossaries here.)
6. Select the glossary and select “Import entries.”
   
7. Browse to select the file saved in step #4.

That’s it! If you have suggestions on how to make this tool more useful or if you have a list of words that you’d like to have prioritized for definitions, shoot us an email.

“Engaging the Voices of Students: A Report on the 2007 & 2008 High School Survey of Student Engagement” from the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University is an important piece of research that I think everyone in education should read.

High school drop-out rates are a national crisis caused in large part by a lack of student engagement. This report looks at what students say about school and engagement. Among the findings are the following.

• Despite high drop-out rates, the aspirations of students are high with 91.4% reporting that they expect to graduate.
• Students report attending school not only because they have to (58%; the third most common response), but because they want to graduate and go on to higher education (74%).
• 67% of respondents report being bored in school every day. Their top reasons:
  • Material isn’t interesting (82%).
  • Material lacks relevance (41%).
  • Work isn’t challenging enough (33%).
  • Work is too difficult (27%).
• Rigor, relevance, and relationships are critical to engagement. Students need to feel some connection to an adult in the school.

There is so much more powerful information in this report, including a collection of student responses to an open-ended prompt. Read it. It might change how you feel about education.

Credit: Matthew Stinson, CC BY NC

Many of you know that I have gotten very involved in the area of open educational resources (OER) as a tool for differentiating instruction.

If you aren’t familiar, OER are materials used for teaching and learning that are free from copyright restrictions or are publicly licensed for anyone to use, adapt, and redistribute. One example of an open license is Creative Commons.

I got interested in this area because of the need to be able to modify and “remix” materials in order to differentiate instruction, using tools like netbooks….and also out of a disillusionment with how much money is spent on textbooks that often aren’t even used.

I am working on a new project now to look at the feasibility of producing a core curriculum offering that is open-licensed. It could be distributed in a variety of formats, including print and electronic. Initially, we are looking at middle school math as a content area.

As a part of this, we are gathering ideas from teachers and administrators on what they’d like to see in a product like this. We want to talk with administrators and teachers to get their ideas to make sure that this new OER product meets their needs.

If you are interested, email me at Karen AT k12opened DOT com. Thank you.

ISTE 2010 (formerly NECC) is using a collaborative process to choose the keynote topic for next year’s conference.

Imagine my delight at seeing Open Educational Resources (OER) near the top of the list!

For those of you who don’t know much about OER, they are materials used for teaching and learning that are free from copyright restrictions or are publicly licensed for anyone to use, adapt, and redistribute. OERs are distinguished from other digital and/or free materials by the fact that they are open, meaning that they can be modified and redistributed freely by anyone.

Here’s a short backgrounder with more information.

OER is where I’m spending a lot of my time these days, because I believe this is a key component to helping teachers and students to have more control over differentiating their learning experiences with mobile technology and other tools. And it is certainly a nice side benefit that this movement could redirect a lot of funding that currently goes to textbooks (unused in many classrooms) to other more fruitful uses, like professional development, coaching/mentoring, etc.

I’ve been brainstorming ideas for applying Web 2.0 technologies to formative assessment. Here is a useful, easy-to-implement idea:

My thought is to use this after each major instructional block of content, which depending on the class and the day, could be several times a day. I think this could be equally effective with students or in professional development. (I’m going to try it next week so I’ll let you know.)

This should be super-quick to administer and easy to get useful data from. Then, we just need to be able to differentiate instruction based on the results. And I have just the wiki for that.

The first eleven Tech Basics videos are now up!

These are intended for teachers who struggle with some of the basic Windows OS skills that can help make them more productive. Topics include things like right-clicking, screen captures, file management, tabbed browsing, and more.

Personally, I am planning to use these videos in workshops. I think they will be especially useful in situations where people are struggling with these skills, which prevent them from effectively performing more advanced tasks like making movies or setting up wikis. My hope is that they will be able to be used a self-guided resources so that participants can differentiate their own PD.

Also, I’ve put the embedded versions in TeacherTube now, so most school sites should be able to get them without filtering problems (I hope). If not, there are downloadable versions as well.

These are all licensed CC-By so feel free to share in any way you find useful, including burning to a CD or putting on your server. And if anyone wants to create more of these or remix the ones that are here, feel free.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be adding quick start sheets and additional resources for each video. If you have anything you’d like to contribute, shoot it my way!

On this blog and elsewhere, I have talked extensively about the need to differentiate instruction, the inefficacy of textbooks in doing that, and the potential of mobile technology to make a huge difference.

Recently, the Indiana State Board of Education issued “An Open Letter to Indiana Educators about Textbooks, Computers and Instructional Materials” (worth a read if you haven’t already) that said essentially that textbooks are not effective or engaging. It went on to encourage schools to pursue technology-based or other instructional materials in lieu of textbooks and to request waivers to use textbook funding for this purpose. They even specifically mention “content-loaded mini-laptops.”

Wow!

This is a very bold and laudable step. I hope that schools will take advantage of this and that other states will follow suit.

(cross-posted form Karen’s Mashups)

Below is one of my favorite mashups of all time — a compilation of different clips from TeacherTube. If you aren’t familiar with TeacherTube, it’s a video sharing service for educators that has all kinds of great content for a variety of subjects and grades and even professional development topics, produced by teachers, students, and professional organizations. I think this is a terrific resource for differentiating instruction (especially with mobile devices).

Full credits and links for this show here.

Please feel free to use this in any way you find useful. I plan to use it at professional development workshops to give folks a quick look at all the great free video resources available to them.

I presented a keynote a couple weeks ago on Open Education. In talking about the reasons for open ed, I make the following points:

• We must differentiate instruction if we are going to engage and reach students who have increasingly diverse backgrounds, skills, and interests.
• Textbooks are not an effective tool for differentiating (or engaging) students.
• Technology can be a better tool, but high quality content is required for effective integration.
• There is a huge industry that has grown up around the development and adoption of textbooks. There is a lot of money invested in this industry, and it is not likely to change, regardless of the benefits to learning.
• Open educational resources (OER) provide a new approach to this challenge.

So after my presentation, a very excited teacher came up to me and said, “I’ve done just what you’ve said! I’ve thrown out our textbooks!” (He told me later that they actually sold their textbooks. Great idea for a fund-raiser!)

He then went out to his car and brought back the materials he’s developed to share with me. He is a history teacher and has developed a very innovative system that he calls the “dynamic classroom.” It involves binders that the kids construct over the course of the year, bringing together predictable learning routines, effective strategies, and hands on activities.

What most struck me in talking to this gentleman was 1.) his passion for his subject matter and for teaching, 2.) how much personal time and effort he’s put into his teaching, and 3.) the results he’s gotten with his students.

Then I started thinking about the potential of this approach. The materials appeared to be perfectly suited to building a wiki. I began imagining each kid with a $300 laptop building interactive web sites instead of binders. The possibilities are rich. Then I started thinking about this project built as an open-licensed curriculum. Everyone could benefit from the work this industrious teacher has done.

I know that there are teachers all over the world doing creative things like this, prompting their students to have rich learning experiences. These teachers know more about their content and engaging kids than most textbook publishers do. I think that most of these teachers are willing to share.

This is the potential of Open Education.
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Image courtesy of Alexander Baxevanis.