This Open Educational Resources & Practices Starter Kit is designed to support educators and librarians begin their OER journey of identifying, evaluating, curating, and authoring/remixing.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This rubric defines a set of open educational practices that help educators to advance a classroom and school culture of open education and to advocate for the potential benefits of open educational resources (OER) in the context of continuous improvement. The rubric is intended to guide educator practice in working with OER to ensure that every student has the opportunity to engage in learning effectively. The rubric supports educators in accessing, curating, evaluating, and adapting OER in response to students’ particular needs, interests, and contexts, to author and share original or remixed resources, and to disseminate approaches to the implementation of those resources for future OER users to benefit from.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
This guide provides a primer on copyright and use permissions. It is intended to support teachers, librarians, curriculum experts and others in identifying the terms of use for digital resources, so that the resources may be appropriately (and legally) used as part of lessons and instruction. The guide also helps educators and curriculum experts in approaching the task of securing permission to use copyrighted materials in their classrooms, collections, libraries or elsewhere in new ways and with fewer restrictions than fair use potentially offers. The guide was created as part of ISKME's Primary Source Project, and is the result of collaboration with copyright holders, intellectual property experts, and educators.* "Copyright license choice" by opensource.com is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Material Type: Reading
Our literary glossary provides a comprehensive list of terms and concepts along with lesson plans for teaching these topics in K-12 classrooms. Whether you are starting with a specific author, concept, or text, or teaching a specific literary term, but do not have a lesson or activity for students to work with, teachers and students will find what they're looking for here.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
Introduction to OER Practices & Tools for Discovery Exploration of the what, why, and how of high-quality OER, highlighting use cases involving successful adoption and implementation of materials. Introduction to effective search strategies to identify resources that meet specific OER need areas and priorities.OER Evaluation & Curation Discovery and customization of tools to evaluate the quality and alignment of resources. Examination of curation strategies to collaboratively identify, evaluate, organize, create, remix, and share OER to meet teaching and learning needs and priorities. OER Authoring & Remixing Deep dive into designing and remixing OER for continuous improvement. Get an overview of OER authoring tool and discover how to edit, describe, and publish a resource. Develop plans for future OER work, including designing and facilitating presentations and trainings, and articulating next steps for outreach and advocacy. Determination of how to best leverage OER tools and practices to continue and grow this work collaboratively throughout the islands.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
This template supports STEM teachers and librarians in working collaboratively to create lessons that build science practice and STEM inquiry skills in alignment with state and national science standards, and that address the Common Core literacy shifts around close reading and building textual evidence.
Material Type: Lesson
This Roadmap is an Informational Text Writing Unit. The unit begins with explaining what non fiction text is, the features of it, and how to write each section within it. Once the student has their first draft they begin with revision. They must prove the existence of certain features within their writing. The writing partner will also have the opportunity to evaluate their work. The partners for organization and ideas, sentence level revision, and editing for capitalization and spelling.
Material Type: Unit of Study
Check out these articles on everything from preparing for the first day to dealing with homework woes, coping as a new teacher and ensuring smooth sailing for substitute teachers. Be sure to explore our 12 volumes of icebreakers and first day of school activities that help students and teachers get to know each other.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Teachers and students come to school bringing a wide range of backgrounds, languages, abilities, and temperaments. Get things off to the best start by asking them to respect their differences and make the most of their similarities. By sharing information on their lives and dreams, students and teachers can build community in the classroom that will support literacy instruction throughout the school year.
Material Type: Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Get ready for the start of school with some of PBS LearningMedia's favorite back-to-school resources! This collection features activities and video resources to help students get to know each other and their new school routines, and lesson plans to help you get your new class off to a great start.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Game, Interactive, Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy
Identify the best teaching tools for your classroom. Engage students and families around positive tech use. Support students' emotional development as they use media for learning and life. Check out the resources below, or bookmark them for when you're ready to dig in.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
Students write an owner's manual that helps them get to know their classroom, provides them with a sense of ownership, and lets others know about their classroom.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
A collection of sites to live webcams, virtual tours/trips, and other miscellaneous fun educational sites.
Material Type: Activity/Lab
Learn about DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). Overview of DNA bases, complementary base pairing, and the structure of the double helix.
Material Type: Lesson
The Castle of Otranto is often referred to as the first Gothic novel. Which is fair enough, so far as it goes; Walpole’s novel did establish many key features of this genre, which has been popular with readers ever since The Castle of Otranto was first published on Christmas Eve, 1764. Like the Gothic novels, plays, stories, and films that followed it, The Castle of Otranto teases us by suggesting that the rules of the everyday world do not always apply, that sometimes only a supernatural explanation can account for everything we see. That idea—which runs against the grain of the assumption that the modern novel is all about realism—runs through books like Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series and thousands more works of fiction, be they written as stories or novels, or filmed for cinema or television.
Material Type: Reading
The Girl Who Thought In Pictures by Julia Finley Mosca, illustrated by Daniel Rieley | Read Aloud for Kids | The Reading BoothBook Description (from the auth... Excellent resource to introduce autism, poetry, and perseverance.
Material Type: Reading
Students learn what causes hurricanes and what engineers do to help protect people from destruction caused by hurricane winds and rain. Research and data collection vessels allow for scientists and engineers to model and predict weather patterns and provide forecasts and storm warnings to the public. Engineers are also involved in the design and building of flood-prevention systems, such as levees and floodwalls. During the 2005 hurricane season, levees failed in the greater New Orleans area, contributing to the vast flooding and destruction of the historic city. In the associated activity, students learn how levees work, and they build their own levees and put them to the test!
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
This collection uses primary sources to explore the poetry of Maya Angelou. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.
Material Type: Primary Source
The Folger Shakespeare Library provides the full searchable text of "All's Well That Ends Well" to read online or download as a PDF. All of the lines are numbered sequentially to make it easier and more convenient to find any line.
Material Type: Reading
In this module, students will use literacy skills to become experts— people who use reading, writing, listening and speaking to build and share deep knowledge about a topic. (This focus on research intentionally builds Module 1, in which students explored the superpowers of reading.) The module will begin with a class study of the bullfrog, an example of a “true frog,” that exhibit quintessentially froggy characteristics. In Unit 2, students will form research groups to become experts on various “freaky” frogs—frogs that push the boundaries of “froginess” with unusual adaptations that help them to survive in extreme environments throughout the world. Students will build their reading, research, writing and collaborative discussion skills through studying their expert frog. Throughout the module, students will consistently reflect on the role of literacy in building and sharing expertise. Students will demonstrate their expertise through a “freaky frog trading card”—a research-based narrative that highlights their research and educates others about the amazing diversity of frogs with a focus on how their freaky frog survives.
Material Type: Module
