Teacher Editorial | By Lisa Hailes
For Beginners by a Beginner
I am a fairly seasoned educator; I have completed graduate courses in technology and am considered a go-to person for technology integration in our school. Yet the pace at which new technologies emerge means that there are many areas where I am definitely still a beginner. Open Educational Resources (OER) has been one of those areas. Until recently I would hear terms in conversations such as Open Universities, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), Open Education, Open Resources, licencing, etc. and be able to follow what was being talked about but was very fuzzy in my actual understanding of what it all meant. Not long before that, my thoughts were that OER was something awesome that was happening in higher education but didn’t really know that it would become relevant in K-12 education. It is relevant. OER are here, they are the future and they matter.
Why Are Teachers Hesitant about OER?
I think that when teachers first start to think about OER, they are often intrigued but overwhelmed. Teachers are working so hard to be able to balance the many demands of the classroom. With a range of learners in the classroom, teachers already spend so much time creating resources and personalizing them to meet each learner where they are at and customize the delivery of their content to create individual learning experiences that are content rich yet engaging.
Continue reading “Getting Started with Open Educational Resources”
The technological world is an ever-growing organism which is in a constant state of advancement. Sometimes, when I feel like I just learned how to do something, the new and improved version gets introduced. I remember (back in the day) creating any kind of document meant saving it multiple times (just so nothing got lost) onto a computer, floppy disc, or a compact disc. Then along came the USB and things were a little easier. All files could be stored on the USB (depending on amount of memory) and easily taken to another computer to open and work on. What a wonderful advancement in technology! Just when I thought nothing could beat a USB, along came “the cloud” more specifically, cloud computing. A more wonderful way to store and share virtually anything the user wants with anyone they want. Never heard of cloud computing? Keep on reading and I will explain a few things I have learned and how cloud computing has helped me as a teacher and a learner.