Presented by Karen Richardson, Executive Director, Virginia Society for Technology in Education; Jean Weller, Virginia Department of Education
#GoOpenVA, Virginia's repository of Open Education Resources (OER), offers a wide variety of materials for teachers and students from complete textbooks to individual lesson ideas. Because they are "open," users can use them but also, and here's the powerful part, remix them to meet their specific needs. This presentation will show how remixing can open opportunities for student creativity.
Certificate of attendance form
Transcript
hello this is Karen Richardson the executive director of the Virginia society for technology in education as one of the founding members of the brainstorm conference I'm excited to be part of this new version with new partners and the scene limitless learning my presentation today is going to guide you in navigating and using open education resources available through Virginia's go open V. a repository I am gonna take a different approach today from the typical click through tutorial kind of thing there's lots of them out there you're very well done so if you want to learn the technical aspects of doing what I'm doing today you can certainly use those
tutoriales to search and learn how to search and share but I really want to focus today on the why question why should I just go to Google why should I just go to another education site rather than this repository and I think the the focus of here today is to help answer that question I think one of the most powerful pieces of open education resources is that ability to read next them and remix them easily so you could take something you can change it and and then re share it out and then I think that's what educators do really really well is that taking changing and then sharing again also have some ideas of things your students can do with that we are resources
you want to follow me on Twitter I'm with she Richie actually if you want to call me on the internet who which you Reggie the slides will be available to you so all the links that I'm that I'm clicking on through go open V. A. will be available and then of course the go open a website is simply go open V. eight dot O. R. G.
let's do a quick review though the we are open education resources refers to free digital materials that can be used or modified by others and that's the really important part for teachers that means that this video or lesson plan you found on the internet can be adjusted to meet your students needs or aligned with our standards of learning Virginia has been a leader in this area and they go open V. a portal that had been in the planning and preparation stage for several years opened to the public in January twenty twenty this website encourages Virginia educators and learners to create share and use digital resources with the end goals of providing equitable access to learning materials and supporting new approaches to learning and teaching if you are a K. twelve educator in Virginia you qualify for that free account and you can use the contact information on the website to learn how to set that up
what makes so we are work or open education resources work is the way that their license I'm not going to do a big lecture on copy right here there's plenty of presentations out there I've put one together for the website as you'll see but the important piece of this is that traditional copyright is very restrictive and and while you may be able to use something in terms of showing an image to your class you're not gonna be able to take that image and make changes to it or take that textbook and make changes to it it's very restrictive the creator owns all the rights and they must grant them to you after you've asked permission
educators do you have a little bit of wiggle room through fair use but again it can be messy and confusing on the other end of the continue or public domain resources these have no restrictions at all Hey are either old anything created prior to nineteen twenty four or they might be government produced materials they're all available to use with no restrictions at all if you when you get a copy of the slides if you click on that resource button there it takes you out to a list of all the things that became available that were created in nineteen twenty four
but we needed something else so in between is what's known as creative Commons and this is fairly new maybe ten fifteen years old this licensing allows creators to make modifications to the traditional copyright to let users know exactly what they may or may not do with their materials truly open materials allow users to not only access and use but remix and re publish and that's what we're going to be focusing on today so let's go head out to the website minuscule out of my slides here I will head out to the website I will go ahead and show you the slide of the ten ideas that we're going to be talking about for using go open V. eight and again these are all linked to yours so when the presentation is over you can come back to the slide and see those links that I shared with you so welcome to go open V. A. again I am logged in everything I'm doing today does require an account let's see some of the things that you can do so in a very timely manner the Virginia decided that one way that they could use go open BA would be to encourage school divisions to share their various school closing plants so they put together what are called curated collections so these are resources all related to a topic in this case the future topics are instructional resources that school divisions have been putting together extended closing resources for administrators as well as information about professional learning for teachers and if we click on that one you'll see how things are shared so if we scroll down here we'll see that this digital learning strategies for E. learning can be remixed and shared some resources tell you that you can do anything you want with some as well and you'll be able to to re mix and and re use some so the nice thing about these are that other schools and school divisions can see what other school divisions are using and then be able to read next those items to create their own plants
another way
that we can help another way that the materials on this site can help is sherry lesson plans teachers do a lot of this and so that's a great way for teachers to use that so here's a lesson plan I found it's actually really an instructional strategy called the honey comb our best and and the nice thing about these plans you can really Tinker with them so the teacher who shared this resource and you can see her names down here her creative Commons licenses there but it's a really an instructional strategy and when we do the resource will see that she put it together specifically for novels that she teaches in her classroom so the rationales there and then when we go and click on the sample activity will see that she talks about how to use this activity with Frankenstein or the picture of Dorian gray two novels that she's teaching well I may not teach those particular novels but I maybe want to go ahead and use the set up that she has put together so I simply click the remix this resource button it goes ahead and opens a copy of it for me in my account and then I'm able to make edits to it if I would like to so for instance if for the sample activity I don't want to do Dorian gray I'm late teach Romeo and Juliet so I can change Dorian gray to Romeo and Juliet and just to a quick edit bear
and then I'm gonna have to decide what items I'm going to include on my honey comb card which characters and then which teams and my going to include once I'm done with that I can go ahead and save it out once it's reviewed it can be published and now I've been able to add it to that particular lesson plan and extend its use for other teachers
one simple way you can contribute to the go open repository is by adding
standards to various resources so for instance in our list yep luster to mathematics websites has lots of good resources but most of them are not aligned to Virginia so I've been working on aligning some of those you can see I added in one alignment here but it's very easy to do I just click the align button it opens up this screen for me and then all the Virginia standards show up so I can go down here to mathematics because this is a mathematics plan no I put in grade one but I bet the slow simply could also work for great too so I choose great too this is about measurement and geometry and then I look down through V. actual standards
and in this case once we get to second grade were actually using standard measurements I standard shows up I click add selected tag
and now I've added two standards there's lots of resources and go open that could benefit from people going in and aligning them to the Virginia standards that's a great way to re mix them so they're more useful for all of us
there are open textbooks are available as well in fact that was one of the early uses about we are was to pull together lots of open resources to create a free text book for people they may like this one be hosted on another site so I found it through go open but it's actually hosted here you'll see at twenty Bucks
re mixing this isn't really an option unless I decided to do it on the wiki books website but when I scroll down to the bottom of the page I see that the text is available via a creative Commons license that means that I can take any of the text in here copy and paste it into my own new book I know we tell kids they're not supposed to do that but in this case that's one of the beauties of we are I may only want one of the chapters maybe I'm only interested in the meat multimedia and virtual resources and I want to take that text and edited to make it easier for folks to get to where I want to turn it into an infographic or or any of those sorts of items I can grab that text and then I can paste it into the authoring tool acco open VA
many of the resources that are shared are just actors standalone resources so fat is a from university of Colorado boulder provides lots of interactive simulations that you can use they do have their own lesson plans on the site but they may or may not be open the way that go open VA sites are so what you can do is use the authoring tool
to build a lesson plan around that particular item so for instance I took it and began to put together a lesson plans for teachers or a lesson plan for teachers that then they can share with their students it tells you exactly what to do tells the students what to do it gives them some ideas about things to do at the website and then it links out to that particular resource you'll notice that there's a student view when I go into edit it
I can also here's what I added I've added my resources to it I could attach a Google doc if I wanted to but then I can also add instructor notes to it so I can say to teacher here's how I did this you might want to play this up and so on and so forth so essentially I'm taking a resource and I'm building a lot out of Virginia lined lesson plan around that particular resource
one of the ways that resources and materials are shared is through content providers so one of the content providers is the Virginia museum of fine arts and it has a new collection that includes African American artists linked to historical documents and literary works so this is been shared on the site and it comes from the Virginia museum of fine arts and you'll notice it's already lined to Virginia all the good stuff is happened well when I scroll down there's a comment from one of the teachers and says this is a good selection of resources but the teacher has to do a lot of heavy lifting to figure out how to use these resources so one of the things that you can do it is as it says right here you can remix these resources so I can open this up in my own
authoring tool
then I might add in eighty is for using this particular item so it drops in the whole resource to me and originally this did have a few ideas listed down here for classroom use but I could edit those and particularly potentially add to them as well but I can also create an actual unit around them and create instead of just having the idea I could actually create a lesson plan around that idea so maybe I want to use it as a conversation starter as as the creator here I could go in and put in those very specific lesson plan ideas and then see the teachers from doing all the heavy lifting again this is why remixing can be really useful to you
one of the other providers for go VA is actually one of my favorite resources on the web called the digital public library of America or G. P. L. Hey and they put together a variety of exhibitions around topics so for instance this one focuses on women aviators you'll notice this one doesn't have any kind of remix button with it again here's one that has been aligned yet that be a great way to help but when I go out and look at the resource I notice it's got lots of photographs within it's got some text about it and any of these could then be used as the basis or a new particular assignment so for instance if we want to look down I I just love some of these pictures that are here these women aviators we might tell some stories about them this photograph even though it says it has a copy rate out it also has a creative Commons you could use this photograph as the start of a story about queen or perhaps other ideas about doing some research into these women or writing a short story about what it was like to be one of these women so you can use this site as a starter for larger ideas but again I could see this site into my particular items and then create a plan around it how would a teacher used this website with their students
another way we use the web a lot is to look for images and I created a guide to finding these openly licensed resources so this is one I created from scratch I opened it up in the authoring tool and I started putting in my materials and if we go and look at the resource you'll itself you'll see so again a little bit about copy rate how to find public domain materials and hello how creative Commons fits in and then how to find creative Commons materials I when you click on each of these they'll take you to that particular section of the site
it's got that remix button right there so guess what if you have additional resources that you want to include you could certainly go ahead and re remixes and add your own resources as well feel free
now for last two ideas cell I've got all these resources I know I can make lesson plans on them not all these images that what can we do with images besides just decorating slides with so I have two ideas for you to end up here today a couple years ago two thousand eighteen for some reason in March I decided every day I was going to make a postcard and a day and that was going to combined open resources along with tax guess what they're call now neat in many cases although you'll see mine are more
honest to goodness postcards but here just a couple samples of things that I did it so here's one where I took a couple of public domain images ones of birds here's one of Emily Dickinson and then I combine them together with one of Emily Dickinson's poems again she wrote these a long time ago the poem itself is in the public domain as well actually sent this book card to quite a few people I really like it here's one where I took one of my own pictures and then I added to doodle on top of it to create a photo
here's another one with poetry I found this image called the seven of tentacles and then I included large here's part of March your on it
this one I just thought was fun it's a play on the fourth and fourth from the digital public library of America it's an image of a calendar for March
this is a fun one with flying to the moon I added in the airplane there and so on and so forth so lots of opportunities for taking copyright friendly images adding some text to them during March I did one for Saint Patrick's day I celebrated several other holidays of course it was women's history month so that was why a lot of them focused on women as well
and then my final idea for day actually came from Tom Woodward he's currently at Virginia Commonwealth University and this was an idea for making historical selfie basically you take an image of a person mostly but it could be a place and you turn it into an instant message Instagram style of host so we had this idea we had created a few of them and I went ahead and used to go open A. as the place to actually create the lesson plan again I started this from scratch I used the open author tool that's part of the website and I was able to put in the lesson plan itself so I've got morning goals I've aligned it to Virginia's studies I've given you some ideas and then here's the sample that I made of Scott making it to the South Pole and realizing that they were not the first people to to appear there so lots of great ideas I used two different images here one of the ten and then one of Scott I added the hashtags and in it is kind of a story on to itself and I think it's something that
that I think students would really appreciate doing you of course can grab my lesson plan it's cop that read next button there maybe you don't want them to create a self you want them to create a website for someone or a Facebook account for an historical event how would something like the American revolution be covered now if there were bloggers and Instagrammers and and and those sorts of things so we could take that simple idea of the historical selfie and remix it with other ideas as well yeah ten ways of interacting with the go open be a repository I'm hoping it will help you other teachers and your students to use the open education resources so just as a reminder you can find the slides at golden G. A. ideas from Bentley and the go open via a website is go open V. eight dot O. R. G. I hope I've got some creative juices flowing and that you'll take some time to explore go open VA.
