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Showing posts with the label MITECS

Open Educational Resources - A New Way

Educational materials cost a lot of money. Whether it is buying curriculum, purchasing items from Teacher Pay Teachers, or taking the time to develop your own and make it truly unique.  There is one other option, and this option keeps getting better and better. Open Educational Resources, or OERs, are resources that are developed by educators, for educators. These resources, which are openly licensed under Creative Commons for use, remixing, and re-sharing, are an excellent alternative to curriculum packs and Teachers pay Teachers.  Currently, there is group of Michigan Social Studies educators that have developed an entire textbook series, the MiOpenBook Project , that is openly licensed and freely distributed. In our current review of science curriculum, we have also found OpenSciEd , a collection of middle school level curriculum aligned to the NGSS standards. One of my favorites, that I had used in the classroom prior to my knowledge of OERs, was CK12.  CK12 is a collection of res

Finding Images and Videos Clips to Use in Class

Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash When it comes to practicing what we preach, one of the areas where students could call us is citing our sources, especially when pulling pictures off of the internet. I was totally guilty of this in the classroom.  When asking students to be creative, we should be encouraging them to use items that are labeled for reuse or remixing. I wanted to share a list of resources that fit that category.  Photos Unsplash Pexels Pixabay New Old Stock Openverse Videos Pexels Pond5 Pixabay Videvo Audio Openverse YouTube Audio Library Free Music Archive While these are an excellent starter, it is still important to check licenses still. Overall, it is an excellent place to start with helping students find items to build their creative projects from.  I originally posted this, but attended a webinar the next day and we talked about this further. This list was shared during that meeting . 

Introduction to the Michigan Integrated Technology Competencies for Students (MITECS)

In 2016, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) published new competencies that students should be learning in the classroom. The state of Michigan and the Michigan Department of Education then adopted the competencies as part of the expectations for Michigan Students.  This set of competencies marks a significant change in the type of technology standards that have been put forth over the course of time. The first time these standards started to show up was in the late 1990s and that was purely using the technology. In the mid-2000s, creativity, innovation, and cognitive learning skills took over. Now, in the mid-2010s, learning and doing is what drives the efforts of technology integration in the classroom. To develop a deeper understanding, check out this presentation from the Michigan Department of Education's consultants on the new MITECS .