It is pretty easy to run a secondary school using open math content. There is Khan Academy, CK12, NROC, and more. But it seems to be harder to find open
education resources (OER) in English language arts.
“A big difficulty in finding OER Language resources has to do with the Common Core State Standards use of
informational text and literary non-fiction,” said Lisa Blum, OpenEd Institute. “This is a new challenge for
teachers. Furthermore the Language Arts standards are requiring a deep engagement of the text and use of these language skills across other disciplines,
such as history/social studies, science and technical subjects.”
Common Core standards call for a mastery of writing and speaking that is different than what has been expected before. “Students will now need to analyze,
infer and give evidence, conduct research and solve problems,” added Blum, “So finding resources for Language Arts is much harder than it was before.”
Common Core math expectations continue to focus on procedural fluency and conceptual understanding. While there were sequencing changes, many of the math
resources that have been available for some time are still very useful.
OpenEd launched in June
with a giant collection of free resources. “With the Language Arts standards its critical to have a volume of resources to choose from,” said Blum, “So
OpenEd’s approach of aggregating ALL Internet accessible resources with deep metadata is what is really critical to having good sources for content. OpenEd
uses teacher usage patterns to optimize those selections further. “At OpenEd we strive to not just find any resource that might be nominally relevant, but
finding the best resource for any standard,” added Blum.
In search of ELA OER
. OER and standards guru Karen Fasimpaur notes that “Even with traditional basal textbook-using districts, ELA is
often taught with a variety of resources (anthologies, supplementals, etc.).” She added that OER tends to “be less full year comprehensive programs and
more a collection of resources....this might include things like ebooks, non-fiction articles, mini-lesson practice activities, writing prompt collections,
etc.” She noted that teachers use “building block” OER, like photos, videos, audio, etc., as students are creating projects.
“There was initially more of a push toward math in OER, but ELA has come along,” said Fasimpaur. She noted FreeReading, a high quality OER program that Wireless Generation (now Amplify) built assessments for. Expeditionary Learning, and Odell Education worked with New York State on an
open ELA curriculum. (see more on her site).
OER Commons
provides an comprehensive infrastructure for educators to find, evaluate and improve upon open curriculum, including CCSS teaching and learning content.
“Teachers not only need to develop their knowledge and skills with the new ELA standards, but also to help fill the gaps we now have for effective
CCSS-aligned content,” says Lisa Petrides, president of ISKME, the creator of OER Commons, “One reason we are focusing
teachers on the OER Achieve and EQuIP quality evaluation rubrics, for example, is to support the continuous improvement of available learning content.
We’ve found through our curation efforts that many ELA materials do not yet demonstrate connections to the text, or using evidence that the Common Core
require.”
“ELA lessons intended to focus on reading and analyzing informational texts must be adapted and built from the ground up, using text-based inquiry,” added
Petrides, “ELA units and courses need to show progressions of text complexity that are suitable for all learners in the classroom. CCSS-aligned materials
now need supports so that students at different reading levels are accommodated and able to participate in inquiry-based literacy.”
Gobs of resources.
As noted last week, Summit Denali, a new Silicon Valley middle school, starts the day with 30
minutes of reading with Gobstopper, an e-reader “platform for schools that allows educators to put the questions
and quizzes they would normally place in worksheets directly into the text.” Gobstopper has lots of open content but some users have asked for more, so
they will introduce rented proprietary content this year. The Activate Instruction platform that Summit
built with Illuminate Education also uses OER in performance tasks. (Same for the Buzz platform used by EAA schools in Detroit, more on that next week.)
It turns out there is a fair amount of ELA OER but some assembly is required. On that front, the Literacy Design Collaborative is a network of groups “building out a template-based approach to
the literacy demands of college and the workplace, as defined by the Common Core State Standards.” For more on the task and template based approach, see
Writing Across the Curriculum With The Literacy Design Collaborative.
Steve Peha, founder of Teaching that Makes Sense believes, “the combination of the Common Core
and affordable Web technology has brought unprecedented access to new materials. Combine this with the burgeoning movement toward Open Education Resources
(OER) and we inadvertently have a signal-to-noise problem on our hands.” He asks, “how do we sort the good stuff from the merely mediocre and the actually
quite awful?”
It’s a tough problem. Peha adds, “perhaps other educational resource discovery services like EdShelf and Graphite will crack the nut of correlating popularity with effectiveness--across different tests, different states,
and different state-mandated cut points--given the time and technology to do so.”
We appreciate the advice of OER experts Steve Peha, Lisa Petrides, Karen Fasimpaur, and Lisa Blum in exploring the topic of ELA OER. There are tons of
great resources out there, and with the help of these tools listed above you can find and assemble them into compelling learning experiences.