I just came across an Open Education Resource that I think may be especially valuable. Teachers’ Domain is an online repository of media resources for educational use, gathered primarily from public television. There are three editions of the site: K-12, college, and an edition specific to New York State educators. The college edition has a number of resources for Science, as well as Engineering and Technology. The K-12 edition has many more resources available than the college edition, but some of the movies for grade 12 could also be applicable for developmental studies and 100-level courses. There is also a “special collections” area that includes—among other things— an Alaska Native Perspectives on Earth and Climate. You may need to create an account to access some of the content.
You’ll want to note the license agreement for any resources you use. As typical with OERs, the licenses range from link and view only, to remix and share with attribution.
Major funding for the site was provided by the National Science Foundation.
The Instructional Design Center (IDC) at University of Alaska Southeast Sikta (UAS) in collaboration with the Center for Distance Education (CDE) at University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) offered the first annual iTeach2 (advanced) workshop for UA faculty last week. By all accounts, it was a successful and productive week! Heidi Olson and I represented CDE as instructors and facilitators, joined by Mary Purvis, Susie Feero, and Maureen O’Halloran of UAS. We met on the Sitka campus. Chris Lott delivered the keynote from Fairbanks.
iTeach2 was a great opportunity to collaborate with instructional designers and educators from other campuses. I came away from the week with several new links and ideas. Two ideas in particular stand out:
- Keep a journal of each course taught. This is such an obvious idea…but I’d never thought of it! I always tweak courses each time I offer them, based on successes and failures of the previous semester, but I just never thought about keeping a journal as I’m teaching.
- The spreadsheet application in Google Docs allows you to generate a form for students to complete. The link to the form can be pasted into Blackboard; as students submit their data on the form, it populates the spreadsheet. The results can then be shared back to students as a graph or chart. In effect, each student sees a form for data entry and the cumulative class data—with or without ever seeing the spreadsheet that generated the chart.