Embedded Files
A few snippets of my outlook on open educational resources...
“We know that what we’re getting is outmoded, unchanging, and once the deal is inked it’s locked in for years to come,” said Sean Nash, district online learning coordinator at North Kansas City School District, of the proprietary textbooks they had been buying year after year. He said, “I really don’t believe that this kind of information, at this level, is proprietary anymore.” Instead, Nash described his district’s decision to co-create instructional materials, leveraging the expertise of teachers to create content that is more dynamic and responsive to their needs. “Already,” he said, “we feel that this is a more sustainable, systemic system than we’ve ever had." Source: New America
"One such district is Missouri’s North Kansas City Schools. Sean Nash, the district’s online learning coordinator, said North Kansas City’s OER implementation was driven by budget constraints during the 2014/2015 school year. Instead of continuing traditional content models, he said, they “looked at a way to do it better, to co-create a system with teachers, where teachers would co-create and vet content.”
Interest in OER drove the district to ask a number of questions, including: “Can we do this? Would this product steer us in a direction we want to go? Are we seeing instructional dividends from this?” he said. “That’s a key question for us.”
Now that the district is using OER, teachers say they won’t go back to the traditional model, Nash said. “This is the new normal.” Source: Center for Digital Education
"Sean Nash said it best during the panel Q & A with North Kansas City Public Schools…”GoOpen honors teachers as the professionals they are.” This was really so simply profound and his words were echoed throughout many of the conversations. Why is this so important? Text book adoptions and mandatory curriculum have hampered many educators abilities to balance the art and science of education. Textbooks and mandatory programs have stifled creativity and served as a crutch for the past decade in our district." Source: What If? - Invest in Teachers
"The migration from textbooks to staff-generated content is benefiting students too. The use of FlexBooks has been a big hit. “When you see the interaction kids are having — it’s just different than we ever interacted with a textbook,” says Nash. “The kids are taking these FlexBooks and marking them up, annotating all over them. Even that subtle shift from a textbook — we’re still in paper, but it’s ours and the kids can treat it as their own. That’s been a shift in and of itself.” Source: Guide to Choosing Digital Content and Curriculum
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