Open Education Resources Can Help Teachers in Planning for Their Classroom

Teachers—if you are looking for ideas and lesson plans to incorporate into your lesson plans, check out Open Educational Resources (OER). Most teachers don’t know much about them because they are hard to find on the web, but here are some websites you may find useful.

The open education movement is supported by many groups but one of the most generous funders is the Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, CA. One of the richest repositories of OER for grades K-12 can be found at www.OERCommons.org founded by Dr. Lisa Petrides in Half Moon Bay, California. Other groups targeting the K12 area include Curriki, HotChalk</a> and <a href=”http://www.scholastic.com/kids/”>Scholastic.</a>. Scholastic is planning to come out with a special site of open resources some time this spring that will be built around book titles. It should be pretty exciting for English teachers.

Other excellent resources at the college level include MIT Open Courseware, UC Berkeley Open Courses, and Yale University Open Courses

Open Courseware Consortium lists all the universities with online courses. Here is a video about them. Monterey Institute for Technology and Education has wonderful courses available to high school students and Rice University has a great site called Connexions.

At the preschool level, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center founded by Joan Ganz Cooney, one of the founders of Sesame Street, is working to make preschool and early education materials available on the web. Keep an eye on them because materials from Between the Lions which teaches literacy skills will be appearing soon.

The Europeans have a great site and much of it is in English so you might want to check out , the EuropeanSchoolNet. Even in China, there is CORE, which has open educational materials in Chinese and English. Here are a couple of other important sites: Merlot that has about 60,000 members and CK12 dedicated to providing low-cost or free textbooks to students worldwide.

In my teaching, I have found these resources to be helpful giving me ideas and resources that otherwise would have taken me hours to prepare. I hope that they can be helpful to other teachers too.