Next week is the Virtual 4T Conference put on by the University of Michigan School of Education. This is a free, virtual conference (but registration is required).

On Monday, May 20 at 7pm Eastern, I’ll be a part of a panel talking about “The Potential of Open Resources for Your Classroom.” Hope you can join this and other V4T sessions and expand your professional learning!

I believe that we have a unique opportunity at this moment when districts all over the country are looking at new curriculum and assessments.

We can either see this as an opportunity to innovate and improve learning…or we can just go on with business as usual.

I recently gave a short talk about this at SXSWedu. Here it is. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

(cross-posted from K12 Open Ed)

The second annual Open Education Week is this week, March 11-15, 2013. Open Education Week is a five-day celebration of the global Open Education Movement, featuring online and local events around the world, video showcases of open education projects, and information. Its purpose is to raise awareness of both the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide.

Here is a calendar of all the events, and here are a few to make special note of:

• School of Open at Citizen Science Workshop – live f2f event, March 10 in Los Angeles
• P2PU: A Showcase of Open Learning – free webinar, Wed., March 14 at 3pm Pacific
• School of Open launch – lots of great, free courses, ongoing

This is a great opportunity to learn more about open and also to share this info with others in your organization. Throughout next week, I’ll be posting daily nuggets of open goodness.

And in case you missed it, here is a hangout a group of us did for the #etmooc about open learning. There are some thought-provoking discussions here.

Next week March 5-10 is the first annual Open Education Week!

Open Education Week is a global event that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education, especially Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are materials, tools, and media used for teaching and learning that are licensed for anyone to use, modify, and redistribute.

The event will take place online and in different locations around the world, with opportunities to participate in webinars, discussions and live events. Participation is free and open to all. Visit www.openeducationweek.org for more information.

How can you participate?

• Participate in a webinar. Here’s a schedule of them. (Times are GMT.) Here are two I’m participating in:
  • OER in K-12 education – Thurs. March 8, 9am central time
  • P2PU – Peer Learning Fueled by Open Content – Thurs. March 8, 2pm central time
• Use some of the great OER for K-12.
• Open license some of your own content.
• Tell someone else about OER. Tweet, post, and spread the word!

Also, if you’ll be at SXSWedu, come to one of my sessions there about OER. I’ll have some great Open Ed week t-shirts to give away there as well

Sharing is good!

FreeReading is a great site for all kinds of early literacy resources. One of my favorite parts is the decodable reading passages.

Unfortunately, to date, these have only been available as pdf files. Pdfs are good for printing, but not much good for other uses, like putting on mobile devices, interacting with, making movies, etc.

The great thing about open-licensed content, though, is that you can remix it.

So this summer and fall, I’ve been working on taking these pdf files and remixing them into PowerPoint presentations, separate jpg art files, and interactive VoiceThreads (with audio and the ability for students to record their own audio).

original pdf:

ppt:

voicethread:

All of these resources for almost 80 stories are available  on Curriki, along with ideas for using them.

Thanks to FreeReading, the Hewlett Foundation, and Bon Education for inspiring the idea to do this and to Steve O. and David Wiley and his Educational Productivity Pledge (see P.S.) for the impetus to move ahead with it.

I have been working for the last few months on an exciting project that is launching today.

The P2PU School of Ed pilot opened sign-up today for seven free, online, open-licensed professional development courses for K-12 teachers.

This program is about peer learning, openness, and deeper learning. It’s hands-on learning driven by each educator’s particular needs and classroom situations. It’s about connecting, collaborating, and creating, not just reading or studying.

These courses are all open licensed under a CC BY license, which means anyone can repurpose the content for whatever purpose they like as long as they attribute the source.

Here are the courses now open for sign-up:

• Differentiating Instruction - description, sign-up open until Sept. 19 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• Student Engagement - description, sign-up open until Sept. 12 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• OER in the K-12 Classroom - description, sign-up open until Sept. 19 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• Teaching in Online and Blended Classrooms - description, sign-up open until Sept. 12 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• Multimedia and Graphics to Facilitate Deeper Learning - description, sign-up open until Oct. 3 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• Writing & Common Core: Deeper Learning for All - description, sign-up open until Sept. 26 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)
• Using Web 2.0 and Social Media to Encourage Deeper Learning - description, sign-up open until Sept 19 (click PARTICIPATE to apply)

We are pleased to announce a new collection of ebooks, especially written for elementary and middle school, that are free and open licensed.

These books include subjects in ELA, math, social studies, and science and are formatted in web, Kindle, and EPUB versions.

We’ll be adding more titles to this collection over time.

Enjoy!

Looking for great free video content for your mobile devices?

Sal Kahn has built a tremendous collection of over 1800 open-licensed videos offering instruction in math and science. They cover topics in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, statistics calculus, and more. These videos are licensed under CC BY SA which means you can use them free of charge and even host them on your own web site, as long as you agree to share (use a CC BY SA license) on any derivative products you build.

Up until now, the videos have only been available on YouTube, which has posed problems for educators. Now, however, the Khan videos are available elsewhere! Curriki has them available as both embeddable and downloadable files. They have also created a group to “organize, extended and build a community of practice around this content.” This is a great opportunity to collaboratively remix this content and add to it. (I have some ideas myself to to remix some of this into a series of middle school math courses in Moodle.)

Another site has collected the Khan videos for download onto a USB drive or server. (Thanks to Steve O. for this link.)

There are sure to be more creative uses of this great collection of content to come.

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.

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.