International OER Exchange Pilot

From OER Commons Wiki

Image: MARINE PROTECTED AREA OF PORTOFINO PROMONTORY: Nautical High School Students in Genoa and Camogli, Italy, Investigate Climate Change Through Sea Temperature Changes and Share Findings with Others in the OER Exchange Pilot

Project Goals

The goals of the International OER Exchange Pilot project are to:

• facilitate the development and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) by teachers and students globally,
• track the development and use of the science learning materials and data collection, especially around climate change study, created in the project through OER Commons, and
• highlight the process and results through workshops and conference presentations.

Project Purpose

The broader purpose of the project is to support the international exchange of information and understanding through freely available resources among teachers and students, especially in the area of environmental science and climate change investigation.

The proposed project will aim to facilitate classroom exchanges of teaching and learning resources between middle school science teachers and their students in various regions of the world. Our goal is to examine the following questions this spring:

• How are educational resources developed and used by classrooms in different countries?
• What impact can sharing classroom teaching and learning experiences and data collection have on the participants, and on others?
• How does a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural approach to K-12 environmental science education, in particular, lead to new understandings for teachers and learners?
• How can exploring these questions shed light on the impact to teaching and learning through using open educational resources? Where might teachers see the most benefit or greatest need?

Teacher Participation

Teachers will benefit from this project by using and developing open educational resources and by participating in an international exchange with educators in other countries. Specifically, participating teachers will:

• gain new resources and current knowledge about global climate change
• receive training on content creation, wiki use, web 2.0 social networking etc.
• participate in the international collection and analysis of climate change data
• engage students in a dynamic project linked to students in other countries
• gain visibility and recognition for their work

Summary of Projects in Progress

• High School in Bologna, ItalyStudying the water cycle
• Technical High School in Bari, Italy: Studying solar radiation; lab activities use a lighting simulation
• Technical High School in Bari, Italy: Students learning about the greenhouse effect through hands-on construction of models. A series of experiments leads the students to understand the properties of different kinds of material and heat absorption; damages to the earth's atmosphere caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, and the various causes of the greenhouse effect.
• Technical High Schools in Genoa and Camogli, Italy: Studying physics and marine science measuring sea temperatures together with the University of Genoa
• Technical High School in Genoa and Camogli, Italy: Students gather and analyze data on atmospheric temperature and water temperature in the Genoa region, both from field study and internet sources (historical data).
  • Students create presentations for younger students on their findings.
  • At the end of June, they will present their findings to the citizens of Camogli, with their partners. The partners are very interested in continuing the project for next year.
  • Partnership with experts from the Muvita Museum of Arenzano in Genoa and the University of Genoa.

• Middle School in San Francisco, California, US: Studying wetlands habitat, native species, especially bird populations observed at Audobon Canyon Ranch nature preserve

• Middle School in Estonia: Working in teams to study historical temperature data for Estonia
  • Sixth grade students will examine historical data for temperature changes in Estonia over a ten year period. Three classes, each split into 10 teams of two students explore different data, and make presentation posters to share their discoveries.

• Middle School in Chile" Studying life and earth science and observing trends and changes to local agriculture, plants, and soil.

The Process

The participating teachers choose the science topics to explore in their classroom and for which they will develop and/or adapt open shareable learning materials and data. The project topic will center on an area of inquiry that has scientific relevance for the participating regions and demonstrates global significance for science education related to understanding global and local issues around climate change. The purpose is to stimulate different approaches and strategies for teaching and learning and apply multi-disciplinary and collaborative means of problem solving and study. For example, a topic such as evaluating energy consumption or the school’s carbon footprint and/or the natural habitat near a school site could involve students in gathering scientific data from their physical surroundings, researching and reporting on environmental, social and economic factors, and producing media in response to issues they might investigate.

The scope of the project will require the following processes:

• Involve Participants: Three or four classroom science teachers at the 7th-8th grade level will be recruited from schools in each of the participating regions to form the working teams from each country. ISKME will facilitate the formation of the working teams, the selection of the topic, and access to existing open education resources related to the topic.
• Create Content: Each classroom teacher and their students will develop open content projects, at first independently and in parallel with the other classes, and second, through an exchange of materials and providing feedback across the teams. Content can include lesson plans, lab activities, classroom exercises, data collection, student-produced assignments, including stories and presentations in any media format that is viewable online or through mutually available software applications.
• Facilitate Resource Exchange and Feedback: Each team will download and use materials from another region to explore the project topic. Teachers and students will create template-based stories about their experiences, challenges, and new understandings in response to using the other team’s materials to explore the topic.
• Encourage Resource Improvement and Lessons Learned: Each team will have the opportunity to modify their materials based on input and stories from the other team. Each classroom teacher will use a template to summarize lessons learned in the OER process.
• Join the Public Forum: After the teaching and learning materials are refined by each group, they will become publicly available and highlighted on the OER Commons web site during summer and fall 2008.
• Report on and Share Results: The materials will continue to be accessible and open for others to use, share, and improve upon, licensed under Creative Commons. ISKME will continue to track the materials’ use and potential derivative works, and create documentation about the project to inform future OER exchanges.

Support for Participants

There will be several support services offered to participants. First, each group of teachers and students will have access to online tutorial materials. Second, each will participate in a live tutorial session about what makes open content valuable and how to create and share open content between teachers and learners. Teachers and their students will have access to a wiki space for collaborating and for posting their materials online. The materials and tutorials will be delivered in English and translated between languages where needed.

Step-By-Step Activities

Here we've mapped out the next two to three months of project activities in a step-by-step way, so we can discuss and understand the sequence of activities. Input and questions about this, of course, are welcome!

Project Steps for Participants

Phase One:

• 1. Get started: Create your account in the online network systems and get familiar with them - OER Commons, wiki.oercommons.org, lemill.net

• 2. Survey: Complete the survey for us to understand where you are now in relation to OER

• 3. Introduction to Why OER: Discuss with the group about OER and related issues
  • View the presentation entitled "What is OER" [here].
  • Please see the April 4 email about these tasks here: April24Tasks
• 4. Share Curriculum: Post a science project or lesson you intend to do with your students in LeMill.

• 5. Find Resources: Search for online resources related to your project or lesson, including seeing what the other participants have posted

• 6. Interact with Curriculum: Discuss your interests and challenges related to your project and what you notice about the projects of the other participants; add comments to at least one participant project; try to use elements or inspiration from at least one participant project - document for the group what you are using from someone else. You can put this in the wiki and/or in LeMill.

• 7. Reflect on Teaching and Learning: Consider the challenges and opportunities to teach about climate change - can you say what your students are looking to learn or needing to learn on this subject? How is the subject changing? How might comments from participants impact your intentions? What are you looking to learn?

• 8. Reflect on Working with Students: Teach a lesson or introduce your project to your class and report back to the group - here are ways to do that: create a page in LeMill, write a short report to everyone via email, post a short report in the OER Commons, add to a conversation in OER Commons Forums and in LeMill.

• 9. Using Data: Post a set of data related to your students' work - discuss the methods and intentions behind the data; are data from another participant useful to you? How?

• 10. Review: Continue to post data, climate change lessons and resources; Review colleagues lessons and resources; reflect on any impact to your teaching

Phase Two: We'll repeat much of the process in steps 1-10 by starting together with one resource and one project.

• 1. Introduction to Problem Spaces, Case-based Learning, and Plant Science - We will have the opportunity to have some experts in plant science/botany education from the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium introduce you to a new resource and their general methodology for approaching scientific inquiry and teaching. This will include some mentoring and assistance in order for all participants to try to do the same project together. We'll discuss what your needs and challenges for doing this will be.

• 2. Share a Lesson or Activity: Post a lesson or class activity related to the Plant Science Problem Space

• 3. Interact with Curriculum: Discuss your and other participants lessons and activities

• 4. Reflect on Teaching and Learning - What are you looking to learn?

• 5. Reflect on Working with Students

• 6. Post and Share Data

• 7. Review - add to the Plant Science Problem Space resources online

• 8. Reflect on the Project: doing collaboration cross-borders, cross-standards, cross-language, cross-time zones, cross-project - what did we learn? What was or is still most challenging, most valuable, or unknown? What can you say about the tools, the communications, the activities overall? What's next? Complete a final survey and evaluation.

Resources and OER Commons

OER Commons supports this project by providing a single point of access through which educators, students, and all learners can search, browse, evaluate, download, and discuss OER that are freely available online. If you login to OER Commons, you can save your searches for future use and re-use. Explore OER Commons by searching for climate change resources and environmental studies resources.

As an introduction, watch the presentation "Why OER?".

Learn more about how to use OER Commons by using the [[Tutorial]] section of the wiki.

Participants in this project will tag useful materials with the common tag, Climate Change Exchange, so all participants can easily find these resources.

Additional Resources

These shared resources support the international exchange of information and understanding among middle school teachers and students in the area of environmental science.

Climate Change Resources

• Keystone.org

Investigative Science Resources

• PlantingScience.org is a learning and research resource, bringing together students, plant scientists, and teachers from across the nation. Students engage in hands-on plant investigations, working with peers and scientist mentors to build collaborations and to improve their understanding of science.

General Interest

Please use the “edit” link to the right to include a new resource.

Spanish Resources

• Bienvenida e Instrucciones Iniciales
• Herramientas y Recursos del Proyecto
• Plantilla de Proyectos Educativos de OERs
• Preguntas Fecuentes del Proyecto

Unless specified otherwise, contributions to the OER Commons Wiki are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share-Alike License

The OER Commons Wiki is a project of The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management (ISKME)