AEM & OER
Accessible Education Materials (AEM)
The AEM Navigator facilitates the process of decision-making about specialized formats of print instructional materials for an individual student by IEP or other decision-making teams. The four major decision points in the process include 1) determination of need, 2) selection of format(s), 3) acquisition of formats, and 4) selection of supports for use. The AEM Navigator provides extensive support for decision-making at each point by providing guiding questions, resources, and links to other tools. The AEM Navigator collects all decisions and all supporting information entered by a team and creates a summary that can be printed or saved to a local computer, along with a running To Do List.
The AIM Explorer is a free downloadable simulation tool that combines grade-leveled digital text with access features common to most text readers and supported reading software. Settings for magnification, colors of text and background, text-to-speech (synthetic and human), text highlighting, and layout options can be manipulated to help educators, families, and struggling readers decide ways in which these supports can be configured to help with access to and understanding of text. The AIM Explorer collects information and prepares a summary that can be printed or saved to a local computer.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
OER DEFINITION
"OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." [1]
Resources
OER Commons - https://www.oercommons.org/
Open Education Consortium - http://www.oeconsortium.org/
Open Educational Resources (OER) Infokit - https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/w/page/24836480/Home
OPEN - Open Professionals Educators Network - https://open4us.org/find-oer/
Achieve.org - Open Educational Resources Rubrics - http://www.achieve.org/oer-rubrics
OER - The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation - http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education/open-educational-resources
Lumen Learning - http://lumenlearning.com/about-oer/
OERu - http://oeru.org/
College Open Textbooks - http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/
Learningpod - http://www.learningpod.com/
Merlot II - http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
MIT Open Courseware - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/online-textbooks/
Open Course Library - http://opencourselibrary.org/
Open Learning Initiative - http://oli.cmu.edu/
Openstax CNX - http://cnx.org/
Free E- Books
Tar heel reader http://tarheelreader.org/
Feedbooks – Requires no registration and you can easily browse by author or title. eBooks are available in EPUB format and do not have DRM.
**Books Should be Free** – Public domain ebooks and audiobooks abound on this site. It has a great layout and genre specific categories that make discovering content quite easy. The audio content is delivered in MP3 format, which should work well with most players and readers. The one great aspect of this site is the ebook formats that are supported. You can get them in EPUB, PDA, Mobi, and TXT files. This ensures you can get books and not have to worry about converting their formats.
**eBooks@Adelaide** - The University of Adelaide in Australia has amassed a fairly respectable collection of ebooks. Some of the books are only viewable in your web-browser and others can be downloaded to your PC. The books are available in the MOBI and EPUB formats, and the site also supports “Read it Later” or has a print option! It has a blog style layout and it’s not too terribly intuitive, but if you know what you are searching for, it is a viable solution. It is important to note that Australian copyright law is different from the USA and the rest of the world.
**Protect Gutenberg** – Considered by most people to be the most definitive website for public domain ebooks. People tend to like this website because they have over 30,000 different books and support many different e-readers. All of the books listed tend to have pages integrated at the beginning of everything you download, so you don’t forget where it came from.
**MobileRead** – The Mobile Read forum community is a solid source to find public domain ebooks. It has a different layout then most of the other stores on this list, because it runs forum software. People dig this website because you can request specific books not included in the main list and people will try and dig them up for you. This helps with obscure open sourced books that stem from other countries. One great thing is it supports the mainstream formats as well as old Sony and Microsoft extensions.
Google Books - Google not only has a paid bookstore that is a part of the Google Play ecosystem, but it also offers millions of free books. The company has partnered with academic libraries all over the world to digitize their entire archives. This ensures that books from all over Europe are available for the entire world to download. You will find one of a kind books here. Google has even converted the Dead Sea Scrolls over to ebook format!
Free Audio Books
http://willoughby-eastlake.k12.oh.us/classroom/technology/stories.htm#Sing a Long
http://www.justbooksreadaloud.com/