On September 21st, I attended the MSDE Open Educational Resources for the 21st Century Summit
A quote from the material sent to us: “The summit (was) organized by a statewide planning committee under the Open Educational Resources Grant, a federal Title II-D ARRA partnership funded through MSDE and led by the Baltimore City Public Schools”
The summit was run very well. The keynote speaker, Tom Vander Ark (gettingsmart.com), author of Getting Smart, a book to be released in October, addressed the rapid pace at which technology is changing the world and education. He pointed out that technology is vastly outpacing our attempts to keep up with it and stressed the need to be proactive in preparing our teaching and our students for the future. He states that our current teaching is Batch-Print (‘batch’ students by age and teach using printed material) and need to become Personal-Digital (place students in smaller groups based on learning level and use technology as needed). He then led a discussion on the benefits and challenges to moving ahead with more technology.
Challenges: Time, money, space--nothing more than what we have discussed in almost all of the classes we have had
Benefits: more learning, critical thinking, global interaction, better preparing students for the future, more flexibility in class structure, and students learning at their personal intellectual and social stages of development and not at a standardized level based on age.
Had I known more about it, I would have encouraged more of the class to attend. However, since all the projects discussed were paid for by federal Title II grant funding, they will all be made available as they are completed.
The sessions that I attended:
· World History Hybrid Course Consortium
· OER (Open Educational Resources)
· Open Source Learning Management System
· Maryland Technology Proficiency Partnership
Some of what I learned:
World History Hybrid Course Consortium:
This group created a hybrid face-to-face/online course for world history. Included in the planning were history teachers from the counties involved and well qualified technical experts. Some of the objectives were to make this free and not dependant on any specific software/hardware. At this point, anyone can use the course, logging in as a student.
By November it will be fully available and in the spring of 2012, a handbook with the details of how the course was built will be available. This handbook can be used as a guide for anyone wanting to do something similar with any subject.
OER (Open Educational Resources):
This group used Title II funds to develop professional development for both teacher and administrators. The plan for the principals is carefully built, not as a lesson or course, but as a toolkit from which to choose the tools an administrator feels will best meet a current need.
The teachers’ program is built on six modules, four of which are fifteen-hour courses and two are thirty-hour. These will earn MSDE credits.
Open Source Learning Management System:
The money for this grant was used to determine how expensive “free” open learning management systems can be. Costs that were considered included money for purchasing any equipment needed, both software and hardware; technicians required to support the teachers; and time required to train teachers how to use the system and how to apply it in their classes. Student costs in both time and money were also considered. It turns out that nothing is truly free and that of the systems evaluated, Moodle turned out to be the least expensive.
I will post updates and websites when I receive them after the projects are completed and become publicly available. Each session that I attended pointed out that the grants are federal funds and therefore, the final products will be available to all schools across the country—public, private, and religious.
