Open Content & Ethics

Open content, as defined by Johnson, Adams, and Haywood (2011), is the sharing of information, practices, and experiences.  Open content can help districts and universities who struggle to keep textbooks current due to funding limitations.  It is creating an environment where schools are feeling a responsibility to share their information.  An example of open content is Thinkfinity sponsored by the Verizon Foundation.  The site offers a blog where teachers discuss information in the digital age.  Content can be broken up by grade level, as well as subject area to further your classroom.  The online open content websites for educators can be extremely beneficial for new and advanced educators.  In fact, the lesson I found regarding “Why Brett Favre makes $8.5 million per year?” focused on the idea of supply and demand, the diamond water paradox, and how it applied to professional athletes’ salaries, and understanding the concept of equilibrium.  They included an entire lesson and resources to allow differentiated instruction.  Educators can use open content lessons like this and adjust them to meet their needs and their students needs.  “Sharable material reduce teacher workloads as they do not need to be recreated from scratch.  The same set of materials, once placed online and made sharable via the appropriate licensing, can also inform a wide variety of learning modalities, not the least of which is learning for the sheer joy of discovery” (Johnson et al., 2011, p. 23).

According to Wikipedia (n.d.) in 1998, David Wiley coined the phrase open content.  The intention of open content is for material to be shared without conventional copyright restrictions.  Users of open content have the right to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute material to make it fit their needs.  It was very interesting to see that Universities like MIT, Yale, and Tufts are making their courses available for free on the Internet.  One open content site that I am very familiar with is Khan Academy.  The site is a not-for-profit organization that has a goal of changing education by providing a free education for anyone, anywhere. Topics range from simple addition and subtraction to much higher levels of math including calculus and statistics.

Free content is also known as free information.  It is legally similar to open content in that is includes all work that is in the public domain and copyrighted works whose licenses credit and support the following:  users can benefit from it, study and apply what is learned from it, make and distribute copies of the content, and change or improve the content and share the modified form of work.

Creative Commons is another not-for-profit organization that uses free legal tools to allow the sharing of creative work.  It is not an alternative to copyright, instead the licenses work with the copyright laws so you can use copyright terms to meet your needs.  In their Commons Deed form, it is much easier for the average person to understand a license. 

Even though I am familiar with ebooks, I had never heard of Flat World Knowledge.  It was created to provide textbook options for students and faculty in a world where it seems the price of a book could feed a family of five for an entire month!  Educators can even modify a book to better fit their curriculum because Flat World Knowledge provides an open license and a MIYO (Make It Your Own) option to modify the material.  According to Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine, and Haywood (2011), "the most interesting aspect of electronic books, however, is not the devices they are accessed with; it is not even the  texts themselves.  What makes electronic books a potentially transformative technology is the new kinds of reading experiences that they make possible" (p. 8). Publishers are including multimedia, interactive graphs, links for more information, and videos. This is an incredible tool that is beneficial to teaching and learning in the classroom.

Johnson, L., Adams, S., & Haywood, K. (2011). The NMC Horizon Report: 2011 
K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., & Haywood, K. (2011).  The 2011 
Horizon Report.  Austin Texas:  The New Media Consortium.
Open Content. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved January, 25, 2014, from  
 http://en.widipedia.or/wiki/Open_content#Major_open_content_repositories_and_directories

In the Clouds

The three cloud computing sties I am following on Diigo are Desmos, Ascend Math, and QuizMEOnline.  I was very impressed with the Desmos graphing calculator site.  It cannot only graph a linear function, but quadratics, and an absolute value.  It also has the capability of graphing trigonometric functions, exponential, logarithmic, and finding maximum and minimum values.  This is an awesome tool for students who cannot afford their own graphing calculator or if they forget it at school.  

https://www.desmos.com/calculator 


In Ascend Math a teacher can easily differentiate instruction with students ranging from special education to the gifted and talented.  It has proven to move students forward two or more grade level in six months.  It is entirely delivered on the web and targets skill gaps and motivates students to be successful.  The algebra readiness appeared to be very challenging and would be useful in my classroom.

http://ascendmath.com/index_stndrd.html

QuizMEOnline is a free social networking service for students.  You can create and share quizzes, flash cards, study guides and notes.  It also allows students to create study groups with one another.  The study groups can include images, links, and YouTube videos.  Students also have the opportunity to create a class or enroll in a class to study a topic at their own pace. 

http://www.quizmeonline.net/

The group that I decided to follow on Diigo is the edmathsites.  It is a group that was created to share websites for mathematics educators.  It caught my attention because the very first website that they were discussing was the Desmos Graphing Calculator site that is mentioned above.  I like how they not only discuss mathematical problems, but ways to motivate students in the math classroom. The have open ended math problems, math challenges for families, real world math examples, and tips and tricks for specific upper level math courses like calculus! 

The use of tags, tag clouds, and social bookmarking can benefit teaching and learning in variety of ways.   The advantage is students can quickly find information regarding a specific topic that highlights their interests or assignment (Friedman, 2007). I have used a word cloud on the cover page of each chapter of our math journals.  I use all of the vocabulary words from the chapter to create the word cloud and then we play an eye spy game with the word cloud in identifying vocabulary words. 

I like the idea of using a web link portfolio.  They are a great way to collect student’s thoughts and ideas throughout the year.  Students can tag a link relevant to the class and complete an online discussion board.  At the end of a year the teacher can have a record of what students have commented on throughout the class.  Classroom polls are also a really great idea to use instead of a traditional bar graph or pictograph that we may use in a math class.  The more a word is typed, the bigger the word is, therefore showing information in a different way.  Finally, the idea about teaching bullying was also very creative and can be used at a variety of levels.  Developing a wordle based on a friend versus a bully and having students decide where they belong is an awesome activity to discuss this serious and relevant topic. 

My principal has talked to me about using a "cloud" to store photos on of our graduating seniors and I had no idea what he was talking about!!  It just makes sense that all of this information can be stored in one place that can make collaboration among educators so much easier! Two examples of how cloud computing can be used in the classroom were highlighted in the 2011 Horizon Report (Johnson, Adams, & Haywood, 2011). Kerpoof looked like a really fun place to make animated movies and had downloadable lesson plans for teachers. Even though it was geared towards elementary to middle school aged children, I can definitely see how my high school students could used this in our graphic design class.  Learnboost was also a site that educators can find very useful.  It can track students grades and progress and then share this information with students.  I especially liked that when creating lesson plans, you can tag common core standards.  I thought it was a  bit overwhelming when I first looked at it, but after I clicked around a bit, it was really a simple process that would make my life easier when developing plans weekly.

Social bookmarking can benefit teaching and learning by allowing users to share bookmarks of websites and ultimately create groups that can share information with similar interests.  The specific website, Diigo, is a free research tool that is a great place for collaboration.  Because of social bookmarking, users can join a group of their interest or even create a group based on a specific research project.  I had never heard of Diigo before and found a lot of resources that I could use in my classroom.  What an awesome place to find resources for all levels and subject areas!




Friedman, V. (2007).  Tag Clouds Gallery:  Examples And Good Practices. 

     Retrieved from   http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/07/tag-clouds-

     gallery- examples-and-good-practices/

Johnson, L., Adams, S., & Haywood, K. (2011). The NMC Horizon Report: 2011 K-12
     Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Blogging & Twittering

Blogging is a tool that can be used in education to create a forum where students collaborate with one another.  It encourages learners to be active throughout the course and helps learners improve their writing skills.  Two blogs that would be helpful to me are Edmodo and YackPack.  Edmodo is a place that I can manage classroom assignments and activities and I think it is important that the conversations are protected.  YackPack could be very beneficial because of the live voice feature. Emailing or texting math language can be very difficult with all of the different symbols. 

According to Johnson, Smith, Levine, and Haywood (2010), teachers are finding that the online tools, such as blogging and wikis, are avenues where students can collaborate to improve their creativity, develop teamwork skills, and learn from people nationwide. Before reading about blogs and what they can bring into the classroom, I was not sure if this was going to work for me.  But, after reading about all of the advantages of a classroom blog, it is definitely on the top of my list! It is a great place for student’s to collaborate and help one another.  I would love to see my student’s posting pictures of problems they are having difficulty with and getting help from other classmates.  Students truly start to understand information when they begin to speak it and teach it.  Some may feel that blogging is just one more way to inhibit social growth, but I see it as an avenue to actively participate in classroom discussions for those that are shy and unsure of themselves.   

Twitter is an online social networking site where people can connect with friends and family, or stay up to date with topics of their choice.  I learned that the the most used words are known as trends and when clicking on a trend it shows the most recent tweets using that trend or phrase.  Hashtags connect related tweets so they can be part of a discussion. 

I, like David Pogue in his article about Twittering Tips for Beginners (2009) , see both pros and cons on tweeting.  Learning about worldly events and local news can be interesting and useful, but as a secondary high school teacher, I have seen Twitter have more of a negative effect than a positive one.  Twitter is a place for immediate, real time responses and when placed in the hands of a teenager, does not always have a positive result.  However, I really enjoyed the “Many Voices” project where students contributed to an online story via Twitter posts.  After reading through the articles and watching the videos regarding Twitter, I am not sure I a see a place for this in education. 

I am following a Flipped Classroom Network on Twitter because it provides educators with knowledge, skills, and resources to successfully implement flipped learning.  It posts free webinars that help educators with the flipped classroom.  It is a great resource to learn about new ideas and readings associated with the flipped classroom.

Johnson, L., Smith, R., Levine, A., & Haywood, K. (2010). 2010 Horizon Report: K-12 Edition.  Austin, Texas:  The New Media Consortium. 

Pogue, D. (2009, January 15). Twittering Tips for Beginners. The New York Times.  Retrieved from http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/twittering-tips-for-beginners/?_r=0