Digital Directions - Fall 2012 - (Page 44)

+ RESOURCES Achieve Created a series of eight rubrics that evaluate the degree to which each open educational resource’s (OER) aligns to the Common Core State Standards, as well as the quality of each resource. www.achieve.org Curriki Launched a free Algebra1 course aligned to the common standards. The course includes real-world examples, projects, interactive online tools, videos, and targeted feedback. http://welcome.curriki.org MyOER A repository of OERs that can be searched by standard or subject. Includes an explanation of the evaluation rubric used to determine each resource’s quality. By registering for a free account, teachers receive an online locker where they can store OERs they are interested in using. www.myoer.org OER Commons A repository of OERs with collections of resources aligned to the common core, including lessons plans as well as implementation tools. OER Commons houses the rubrics created by Achieve to evaluate the alignment to common standards and the quality of OERs. www.oercommons.org in almost every federal grant that the product of the grants needs to be shared as an OER,” she points out, allowing all states to leverage the tools that are produced by states that receive certain federal education grants. But teachers also need support to use the resources properly, says Treacy, addressing one of the challenges of the OER movement. Critics of open resources contend that even though the materials are free to use, they may not be as easy to implement in a classroom as a ready-made, prepackaged proprietary resource, such as a textbook. “Even with this huge amount of curricula and these lesson-plan websites aligned to the common core, that is still not going to do the trick for having teachers make the shift … without the PD,” Treacy says. “Teachers still need training for how to find the stuff they need, how to understand what they find, and how to adapt it for their students.” (See related story, Page 29.) Because of the vast array of open education curricula available on the Internet, teachers need to know how to wade through the material and evaluate its quality to determine how it might work in their classrooms, she says. Another challenge of bringing OERs into classrooms is making sure that the resources teachers are using are highquality and aligned to the standards. Because anyone can create and contribute a resource to the broader OER repositories, the resources vary widely in quality. One tool to help educators determine the quality and alignment to the common core of a particular resource is the OER rubrics developed by the Washingtonbased Achieve, a nonprofit education policy group that helped write the Common Core State Standards. The rubrics are hosted by the OER Commons, a repository of more than 30,000 open resources created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, or ISKME, based in Half Moon Bay, Calif. The rubrics evaluate resources on eight different aspects, including their alignment to the standards, the quality of technological interactivity, and the quality of the instructional tasks and practice exercises. Each material is evaluated on all eight rubrics, scoring from a zero to a 3, with zero being “very weak or none” and 3 indicating “superior.” “Our goal is just that whenever people think about which resources to use for instruction, that they consider all these different aspects,” says Jennifer Childress, a senior adviser for science at Achieve. “It’s a rigorous way to determine quality so that multiple users can know the same criteria.” Through the Learning Registry, a joint effort between the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Defense that provides a platform for technical protocols for aggregated resources, each time a resource is evaluated, it is encoded in that material’s metadata, so that no matter where the resource is being viewed on the Internet, it will still contain the rating information. Although the rubrics were written with the common core in mind, says Childress, they could be used with any set of standards. “The evaluation rubric was meant to be portable so that other people could use it in their own collections,” says Lisa Petrides, the president and founder of ISKME. And the rubrics are detailed enough to help lay the groundwork for improving resources that may not rank high, she says. For instance, some materials receive low rankings because they do not include an assessment component, which could be added by another teacher to make the material more robust. Open Textbooks in Utah Some states, such as Utah, have embraced OERs as a way to provide teachers with the curricula they need to make the shift to the common standards. Considered a pioneer in the OER movement, the Utah legislature has supported the adoption of open resources by adding language in policy that allows districts to use the free digital materials. In Utah, curricula, including textbooks and OERs, are adopted by each district rather than at the state level. But the Utah 44 >> www.digitaldirections.org  http://www.achieve.org http://welcome.curriki.org http://www.myoer.org http://www.oercommons.org http://www.digitaldirections.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Directions - Fall 2012

Digital Directions - Fall 2012
Contents
Editor's Note
DD Site Visit
Bits & Bytes
Shifting to Adaptive Testing
Tailoring the Tests To Special Needs?
Choosing the Right Device
Bandwidth Demand Rising
Are You Ready?
Where’s the Money?
High-Priority Virtual PD
Online PD Destinations
Virtual Ed. Dives In to the Common Core
Open Education Resources Surge
Security

Digital Directions - Fall 2012

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