Digital Tools for Schools: Open Educational Resources (OER)

Smarthhistory is the Art History arm of Khan Academy. From Ancient Civilizations through 21st century arts, this site offers videos, photographs and images accompanied by a (usually video) discussion of the historical significance of art and architecture for each period. The videos are narrated by two art historians while visitng artwork in museums around the world. 

Searches can be sorted by Time Period, Style, Artist and Themes.

The video below is an example of the videos using Degas and Modernism as the subject.

iTunes U  content can be viewed online, but to access the content you must download iTunes, a free application from Apple.

There are thousands of courses in both audio and video format from universities and K-12 schools.

It is also possible to create your own course in iTunesU. The video below explains the process.

Khan Academy is well known for providing free flipped classroom teaching videos on a lot of mathematics, a little science and economics, some computer programming, and a bit of arts and humanities.

There are Learner, Teacher and Parent resources available on the help pages.

Wolfram/Alpha introduces a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers — not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods.

Take the Wolfram/Alpha Tour to better understand the basic elements of its search engine.

Project Look Sharp: One of the best sites around on media literacy and media deconstruction. Based out of Ithaca College the site offers free media, images and curriculum instruction on how to lead a media deconstruction class using current news and content related topics. 

The focus of Project Look Sharp is media literacy, and the website has full curriculum kits for all grade levels, including videos (on their Vimeo channel), images and documents.

The Poetry Foundation publishes Poetry magazine and offers free access to the magazine's archives back to 1912. The site posts poet biographies, articles and poetry, videos, podcasts, and full features such as the Poetry of World War I.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. From the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science, DPLA provides access to openly available materials. 

An interesting DPLA collection is called The Map. By clicking on the red circle in each state you will be taken to all of the historical collections that state has uploaded to DPLA.

OER defined: OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.*

The resources listed below offer a wide variety of tools, ideas and assessments.

*source: http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education/open-educational-resources

Edudemic connects teachers, administrators and students with resources, articles, tutorials, "Best of Guides", and digital tools, all within the context of education.

Edudemic Teacher Guides to Technology and Learning include guides to Twitter, Flipped Classrooms, Badges, Student Safety, and much more. Each guide offers tips, ways to use the tool or concept in the classroom, and there is usually a cool infographic involved for the visual learner.

The Best EdTech page lists several devices to choose from, including laptops and tablets. There are also lists of Apps for both iPads and Android devices. 

Edudemic also has a site for students and a site for teachers, each highlighting issues specific to their respective groups. There is a lot here that is worth looking into and more here than can be listed in this box.

The Adobe Education Exchange offers both self-paced and collaborative courses for teachers who want to expand their expertise in using Adobe Creative Suite with students. Curriculum and lesson plans are also available.

A large variety of lessons are available from the Resource tab. 

Classroom-Aid is a repsoitory of repositories. In other words, visit this site for annotated lists of sites with open-source, media, textbooks, and eBooks.

This link will take you to Open Souce Multimedia, Open Source Sound and Open Source Photo repositories.

Open Source Textbooks, and free eBook resources can be found here.

The Play and Learn page covers game-based learning in several content areas as well as video games for learning.

Connexions (CNX) is an educational content repository offering free resources online and in several downloadable formats. Originally developed for teachers to create their own textbooks using pages and books from the CNX repository, this site also allows users to access and use any and all content in whatever form they wish.

To get started viewing content, use the search page.

Saylor Academy organizes and develops online courses that are freely available for use by all. Courses are arranged in a course catalog.

The Saylor FAQ answers questions on resources, courses, availability and expertise of the developers.

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching), is a free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community.

The information page about MERLOT contains information about the types of resources curated and how to best use MERLOT.

Find MERLOT FAQs here.

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Subscribing to their RSS Feed promises to send amazing literary and cultural performances and resources to your mailbox on a daily basis. 

For teachers, Open Culture offers a Free K-12 Education page with grade level and content area resources in audio books, ebooks, videos, and interviews. They have classic films, foreign language resources, art and visual culture resources, and the list goes on.

Below is a video posted on Open Culture.

OER Commons offers teaching and learning materials freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student, or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world. Materials are organized by content area, education level, material type, media format, etc.

Create an account and you can save resources, submit materials for inclusion in the OER Commons, and join OER Commons groups.

The OER Commons Help page offers information on the organization of materials, locating resources and links to the OER Commons FAQ.