For those of you reading this and who are curious as to what I have been tweeting about the last few weeks and what the #oltd505 is all about, I will attempt to write this for you to understand.
   
This week we had the privilege of having Stephen Downes come speak to us via our blackboard collaborate classroom. Stephen is a Canadian who writes a blog titled“OLTDaily” (full bio here: http://www.downes.ca/me/index.htm). While with us, he discussed OERs, MOOCs and the future of both in his session with us. He also shared some pretty interesting definitions which I felt would be the best way to describe the terms to my friends who keep seeing me tweet about stuff we do in class and then text me,
tweet me or email me to ask, “what the heck is OER?” I think that the best definition he shared that I would pass on to a non-OLTDer is the one from the Centre for Learning Technology which states: “Open Educational Resources are freely available teaching and learning materials the author has licensed in an open format to allow others to re-use and adapt.” (http://clt.lse.ac.uk/digital-and-information-literacy/OERs.php)

 The licensing that Stephen talked about was also interesting. I knew that there was more than just a “creative commons” license but I did not think that there would be an entire list. This just proves how little I have
looked into this because I have been too busy immersing myself in all of the different OER websites to find resources and video tutorials to benefit my student’s learning. For those of you like me and did not know there is more than the one or two here is the list (by Stephen http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/2013-05-25-couros-course2013): By Attribution, NC – Non-Commercial, ND – No Derivatives, SA – Share Alike, CC-0 – Public Domain, ‘Free Culture license’ and No-DRM.

 A quick note about the MOOC part.  A MOOC for those of you who do not know is a Massive Open Online Course. MOOCs are put on by many different websites and cover a whole range of topics. If you look at my previous post “Coursera” you will see I have talked about the website which is one of many that offer these
MOOCs. There is also a difference between MOOCs, there is a cMOOC and a xMOOC. cMOOCs are based on connectivism; students create and navigate their own learning which means that this type of MOOC is hard to evaluate. xMOOCs are based mainly as an instructor guided lesson with short videos and tests with a minor bit of discussion forums; learning is tested and certified. You can also read more about these two MOOCs at http://degreeoffreedom.org/xmooc-vs-cmooc/.

 Stephen referred to this picture (CC Stephen Downes, May 25, 2013) during our presentation where the future of VLE – Virtual Learning Environment (if I am not mistaken) is displayed. When he displayed this picture for us to see, I was interested in the fact that RSS showed up quite a bit. We have started to use RSS for the first time in this 505 course and now that I understand it, the graphic makes a lot more sense. For those of you still wondering, RSS is a feed that allows you to see what is new on a website without having to scroll through all the old stuff – I believe someone explained it as the footnote scrolling at the bottom of the screen during a CNN broadcast?

 Ever heard of the phrase “clear as mud?” well I hope after reading this and with the links provided I have managed to make it a little clearer than that for you.

I have to admit, the main reason why I looked into Coursera this week is I have been seeing the #coursera on twitter a lot lately. I follow educators such as Verena Roberts and Alec, as well as others. To be completely honest, when I am quickly scanning through tweets while nursing my daughter in the middle of the night, I thought that it was courosa, referring to Alec and not an actual MOOC 'company'. Finally I have figured out the difference and in doing so I have looked into this website that was baffling me for a while.

 Coursera.org is a MOOC website and as I am typing this the count of “Courserians” has gone from 3,665,604 up to 3,665,609 and I have only typed one paragraph so far! The website says you can “Choose from 300+ courses in over 20 categories created by 62 Universities from 16 countries.” I decided to search their courses and see if I could find any that appealed to me. I have already started a “watch list” as I don’t know if I can commit to them not knowing what this course has in store for the fall but some of the classes I am currently watching are (all were found under the teacher professional development search):
Surviving Your Rookie Year of Teaching: 3 Key Ideas &High Leverage Techniques: https://www.coursera.org/#course/rookieteaching
Foundations of Virtual Instruction (through UCIrvine): https://www.coursera.org/#course/virtualinstruction
Emerging Trends & Technologies in the K-12 Classroom (also through UCIrvine): https://www.coursera.org/#course/k12virtualtrends

 Something else that I found interesting is that five of their courses have been approved for college credit
recommendation (although this is based in the US so I do not know if this applies to Canada). In the websites blog, (http://blog.coursera.org/post/42486198362/five-courses-receive-college-credit-recommendations) Duke Provost Peter Lange said “We are excited by this opportunity to experiment with new ways of using our MOOC courses to extend our educational reach and provide credit for students who would not otherwise have access to our faculty. MOOCs, often in combination with the creativity of individual universities, have much potential
to open and enrich the educational offerings available to students across the United States and the globe.”

It will be interesting to have the opportunity to take some courses through this site in
  the future once they are offered at a time that works with my schedule
(unfortunately I could not really find any that I wanted to take that were
offered through the summer but I have just had a quick glance so
far.


3,665,747 and
  counting...

  
The first time I publicly shared work that I was doing in the classroom was when I attended WestCast in Brandon Manitoba in the winter of 2011. I was still a student teacher at the time in my final semester of my degree. An opportunity arose for me to attend WestCast through a travel grant offered at V.I.U. so I jumped at it
and went. While I was there I did an hour long presentation on inquiry based learning in the classroom (with a few deans and superintendants in the audience so it was a little scary, I have to admit). This was also the first time I had the pleasure of listening to Alec talk as the keynote speaker – and have my first ever introduction to twitter.

  I have to admit, I only used twitter through Alec's presentation that day way back when because it was new and big and scary. Now I can say that I check my twitter feed daily and I am following 53 people and I even have 31 people following me! Some days it still seems big and scary – information flying in from everywhere at a pace that is hard to keep up with if you don’t sift through it all to find what is relevant for you. Anyways, I digress...

  I have attempted my first vlog tonight. I was inspired by a post Michael had about his student completing a how-to video using Bandicam; I thought if he could do it, so could I. I was wrong! After fighting with the program for a little while and not being able to get any audio to go with my video I set out on a google search and found
Debut, which is what I used for my vlog below.

**As a note: while trying to add the video onto this blog, I encountered another problem that I had to pay to be able to embed a video unless it was a youtube one. Now I have a youtube profile and have uploaded my first video on there. I also realized while uploading to youtube that it has its own video capture program that I probably could have used in the first place and saved a lot of hassle. You live and you learn...

It’s funny how one thing leads to another which leads to another.
Pinterest lead me to the teachers pay teachers website which caused me to search teachers sharing with teachers which lead me to where I have been (in cyperspace) for the last little while. www.sharemylesson.com is a very intriguing website, I mean just the title / U0RL was enough to get me to choose it from a long list of google results. This is a free website and it only took about 2 minutes to sign up. You just need to put in your email, then you will receive an activation link where you just have to choose a username and password. It was created by the American Federation of Teachers and TES Connect. 

The website states: “Share My Lesson is a place where educators can come together to create and share their very best teaching resources. Developed by teachers for teachers, this free platform gives access to high-quality teaching resources and provides an online community where teachers can collaborate with, encourage and inspire each other.” There is an introduction to the website that is only 3 minutes long that can be found at:
http://bcove.me/l6ie1cxf and a teachers take on the effect of the resources found on the website that can be found at the bottom of the page: http://www.sharemylesson.com/article.aspx?storyCode=6000208&navCode=285.


As I do with most resource websites, I started with a search for mathematic items. I came across a middle school math activity that used a CSI investigation as a platform for doing math. The students are presented with a list of suspects and then it is there job to determine who committed the crime. The students do this by going through all of the evidence and completing the necessary tasks (works on ratios, percentages, decimals). It is clearly laid out and the students are even given a limit of 50 minutes to complete the task and inform the chief inspector who the killer was (obviously you could adjust the time to fit the learning needs of your student which is nice).

 The next subject I quickly took a look at was English. One of the first things I came across was a persuasive writing / speaking activity. I remember in one of my practicum classrooms we took the students on an overnight trip to the Vancouver Aquarium as part of a critical discussion lesson group. The students were making personal choices based on research and our trip to determine if they thought keeping animals in captivity was a good thing or a bad thing and why. I had forgotten about this (I don’t know why as it was such a great experience as a teacher) and I am glad this resource reminded me. I am looking forward to using this with my students this year and hopefully having critical discussions with my students to help them deepen their thinking and learning.

 This website also houses a community forum. Some of the forums I found were more directed to the US teachers with learning outcomes but there is a general forum that encourages teachers to “Exchange ideas about pedagogy, share best practice, ask for advice from your peers or discuss anything school-related.”  
 
All in all I think this is a great website and although there have been so many thrown our way in the past little while and I am sure there is still more to come, I encourage you to take a look if you have the time. There are over 262,000 resources and it is very easy to refine your search and find things that are going to be useful to you and your students. There are some how to videos to get started if you really need them as well as a common core icon that is explained but in looking into it, it seems to be more of a united states thing more so then Canada but a lot of the outcomes for the lessons still fit somehow into the BC PLOs. I noticed at the bottom of the homepage that there are featured resource partners, one of which is “The Teaching Channel”, I think this might be the next detour my
curiosity takes me to...

Teachers Pay Teachers

I stumbled upon the website www.teacherspayteachers.comat 3 am while nursing my daughter (apparently good things can happen by being woken up multiple times a night) and saved the website to look into at a more reasonable hour. I honestly can’t remember what rabbit trail led me there but I am glad it did, for the most part.
   
Right off the bat the title of the website caught my attention. Teachers paying teachers, what an interesting concept, I immediately thought that it would be better if it were teachers sharing with teachers but not long after exploring I found out that there are different levels to this website. There are the paid for items –both regular price as well as sale items – but there were also over 97,000 free items. Another thing that I liked right off the bat was you could refine your search from the homepage to the grade range you are looking for as well as the
subject.

To start my in depth exploration of this website I decided to search for free poetry items for my grade 8 students. I noticed that each of the items is rated by the people who have downloaded them and used them so I decided to sort the results by their ratings. It was nice to get feedback from others who have used the resource before blindly using it with your students only to find that it was a complete waste of time and not worth the effort. I also liked how it would tell you if the item was a worksheet, a printable item, a project, a lesson plan, a power point- well you get the idea... 
 
Teachers pay teachers has a smart phone app that I looked into but the app is more for sellers to track when people have purchased something and to answer buyer questions and for buyers to browse the items to add them to carts and wishlists. The website claims “Teachers Pay Teachers is an empowering open marketplace where over 1.5 million teachers buy/sell/share original teaching resources and make teaching even more
rewarding. In fact, teachers earned over $15,000,000 on TpT in 2012 alone, and others have saved countless hours not having to reinvent the wheel every night.” 

This website reminds me of pinterest in a way (now that I think about it, I think that is where I found this website in the first place) as you can follow certain “sellers”; although this part of the website defeats the purpose of OERs, it does have the free section that allows for open access.

 Through this website and wishing there was a more “sharing friendly” title, I was curious to search. I went to google and typed in teachers sharing with teachers and found a few websites, one of which was www.sharemylesson.com which I am going to look into now and see what it is all about. Blog post to follow shortly, I’m sure...


  

  While reading a peer’s blog post (found here: http://michaelmlearnsonline.weebly.com/15/post/2013/05/may-13th-2013.html#comments) this week I was introduced to flexbooks and CK-12. After a bit more exploring I came across the CK-12 website (http://www.ck12.org/student/). This website looks really cool, from what I have seen through my explorations so far and I am sure that I will find a lot more interesting resources that I can pass on to my students. Right now my big focus is getting math resources set up for my students because as I have stated in the past, this is the one subject that I find students struggle with the most because of the lack
of face to face interaction. Explaining math concepts over the phone or skype does not do it justice and trying to write with the mouse on the computer screen (blackboard collaborate) only works so well.

 The book that I have started to look deeper into, as a starting point, through the ck12.org site is the CK-12 Middle School Math – Grade 8 book. I am teaching grades 8 and 9 currently but next year this will change and I will possibly have students as young as grade 4 (although most will still be in the 8 and 9 range). When looking at this book it shows an easy to follow table of contents and very in depth and step by step instructions. My students will benefit from this extra practice when they feel that they are not solid on a concept.

 As a test I signed up as a student and went through a concept test to see what my students would experience if they were to take these practice tests. The picture that I have added with this post is what students would see when they look at their progress page. As I have been going through this website it seems to me that it could be the entire curriculum for math that my students would need for the year and it would eliminate the need for them to purchase a physical textbook. For now though my students are using a school selected curriculum and I would have to continue to look deeper into this before making the switch. One thing that would sway my opinion would be if somehow this student page could be linked to a teacher one so I could log in and see the progress of all my students. For all I know this is a possibility and I just have to dive in deeper but these are just my thoughts after scratching the surface of the site.

 Hopefully I have inspired a few people to check out this site for themselves but for now I will leave you with my first impressions and continue to explore deeper...

This week I went to Salmon Arm to attend our annual staff training. When I arrived, the first thing I was handed was a package with a bunch of forms, papers and a booklet; the booklet that was included was called Copyright Matters(3rd edition) and it is put together by the Canadian Teachers’Federation, it can also be found online (link at the bottom of the page). When I opened the book, the first page I turned to happened to state: “The authors have sought to simplify a very complex subject” and my first thought was ‘awesome! Finally a simple explanation.’ I wish there was a book titled CopyLeft Matters, but for now this one will have to do.

 I found this book helpful because of the fact that I am creating online courses for my students to take advantage of next year and I wanted to allow them the most opportunities possible. Our school works with Christian resources that allow students to work through workbooks and have a test at the end. These books are usually about 30-40 pages long and the test is usually 2-3 pages long. I have many students who have chosen to do this type of resource and then mail the tests to me. I wanted to do something that would help eliminate the need for students to mail work to me and make the process easier and faster. This is where I read the ‘fair dealings’ section of the book.

 The ‘fair dealings’ guidelines state that “a single copy of a short excerpt (up to 10 per cent of a copyright-protected work) may be provided or communicated to each student enrolled in a class or course as a
posting to a learning or course-management system that is password protected or otherwise restricted to students of a school.” This made me really happy to see because as my LMS is password protected, I could give the benefit to them. There is also a section where it states that teachers can copy for tests and  examinations, which helps eliminate the worry that I will have someone come and tell me that I am not allowed to do what I am hoping to do. I have had many parents who I have since contacted who are very excited to save on postage costs with this possibility and do not have to worry about anything getting lost in the mail.

 One last thing I will say is that it is interesting that it says “This document may be freely reproduced without obtaining the permission of the authors, provided that no changes whatsoever are made to the text.” This does not seem to fit the CopyLeft way of thinking but at the same time it would not work to have the right to change information and redistribute it because someone could easily say that up to 75 per cent of a text could be
reproduced.  This has just opened
my eyes to the fact that CopyLeft is a great concept and a great thing to have,
but it is not applicable for everything and there is still a time and place for
copyright.


CopyRight Matters 3rd Edition http://cmec.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications/Attachments/291/Copyright_Matters.pdf


 

As a DL teacher I have found that the hardest subject to teach without being f2f in a day to day situation is math, which may be a good thing as math is what I did my bachelors in. A little bit of background information about me: I knew I wanted to be a teacher when I was little and all through high school I was a tutor. When I got to my university application and I was trying to figure out what courses I would like to take I was honestly fine with anything but social studies (I never liked it as much as the other courses) but my passion was for math – and with tutoring I noticed that is also where the big struggles were for a lot of others.

 My students and I have a minimum of one conversation a week – some don’t even need it but it is a requirement and some need more help than once a week and that is fine too. The hard part is when I get a phone call asking for help on page 82, question 5; as much as I could explain it over the phone, math is a very visual subject and it just does not do it justice to just talk about it – this is where my excitement for video tutorials came in. Khan Academy video math tutorials are something that I have come across through oercommons.org and it is the first OER that I have introduced to my students.  
 
The Khan Academy videos are good but one of my problems is so far when searching for them, I have come across about a dozen or so that are in Arabic which causes me to have to search again or use the advanced search option for English which resets every time I look up a new topic, unless I am doing something wrong which might be the case. The other big issue that I am having a hard time getting over is the videos seem to just have one example and then they are done. I know that some have more than one example which is great but I have yet to come across a video with three examples (at least ones that stay at the level of my students).

 This summer I am using Canvas (a LMS) to create online classrooms for my students, through OLTD 504 final project, my grade 8 and 9 courses are almost complete but I have agreed to teach grades 4-9 next year which means as soon as I have a student enrolled in the courses, I will be creating more online. My hope is that I can take my math resources that I use with my students along with my Bamboo tablet (a tablet that captures your writing and puts it on your screen) and create some of my own OERs for math that use examples from the textbooks so it is relevant for the students. I hope that if I can accomplish this then I can also share them with the educational community as my way of paying forward the allowances of the Khan Academy videos I have been privileged to. I am still unsure about which screen capture program I will use – hopefully a free one if
  there are any suggestions out there?


Now I am off to find another OER that my students can take
  advantage of to deepen their learning...

I have watched Sir Ken Robinson speak about 21st century learning and the changing paradigms a few times via the RSAnimate web video (http://www.thersa.org/events/rsaanimate/animate/rsa-animate-changing-paradigms) and I have begun to wonder if there will ever be one created about Open Resources or MOOCs, or even distance education for that matter. For those of you who who have never seen an RSAnimate video before, I highly recommend it, and the first one I would watch is the one I have posted above. 

RSA takes talks (like TED talks) and there is an artist that illustrates the lecture on a white board as the person is speaking. I found this very helpful to have real time illustrations while listenening to what the person had to say - it made me feel like I was a child being read a bedtime story again.

This week I was reading a blog post by a peer about how we are learning so much and it resonated with me that she felt like it was too much to keep up with everything everyone was posting. It seems like every hour or so my phone buzzes again because there is a new post in our google community or a new #oltd505 tweet with something else that someone found and if I were to watch every video or read every article I would probably have to be up all 24 hours of the day to really let it all sink it to be useful information to me. This is where the balance begins of sifting through what I think would be relevant to my own learning and deciding what might not be at the top of my priority list. In doing this I have to also keep in mind that there are expectations for the course that have to be met but they can be met in a way that I can actually use the information I am obtaining
rather than reading something and then forgetting about it the next day because it was an obligation.

This is where RSA comes in... I really wish this could be a suggestion based website. In my ideal world I would take all the information that everyone is posting, hope someone speaks about it and then have it illustrated and put up as a video so that it would sink in more with me... I mean, how nice would it be to have all the information that is out there about MOOCs, OERs, eTextbooks, etc, all rolled up into one speech that in an RSA format.  o me that would be fantastic!  If anyone knows of such a thing, please pass it on! I have spent about 30 minutes this evening searching for something but I keep coming up with 'no results found'.

Honestly, I can watch and listen to videos of the speaker standing in front of a crowd all I want but if I could
watch all education lectures as an RSA video, or similar format, I know I would take a lot more away from it. It is something about the interaction. I have been present at speeches where the person just seems to drag on and on and it is hard to stay awake but I have also been at speeches where the presenter is engaging the audience - having them tweet or upload pictures or even complete surverys - through the presenation and those are the presentations that I take a lot more information from.