Open Source

Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons is a website where teachers and students can share what they know. Others can review, tag, share and sometimes change the information. To join OER, the user has to register and the service is free of charge. Depending on how you choose to display your information, other users will be able to use your work, change some of the content as long as they give credit to the author. There wasn’t any particular resource that stood out for me, but it is great to know that there are many subject areas that can be searched by grade level, subject areas, materials types, etc, to simplify the search of what you are looking for. OER’s Community serves to help teachers become more aware of the things they can accomplish in their classrooms. They provide tips on technology, teaching and learning, research, etc. that may help teachers become better teachers. You can also post blogs and post them on the OER website. You can help the OER Community by providing other users links to information about open source and anything related to what specific schools and the government is doing to expand teaching. I liked that, just as Delicious bookmarking, you can bookmark any of the other information that you found through researching the site with tags. This makes it easier to find what you are really looking for. It is really neat to see how other people can spark ideas for teachers to improve the interest of their students in the classroom. For example, they can look for games that will help assess the material or become a secondary source for students to learn. It can also help generate ideas that will make teaching funner and more interesting to students, which is important since students learn better when they are interested in what they are being taught.

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