Welcome back Carly’s Crew! 

Today in Tech we dove into the topic of Open Educational Resources. We began by watching a documentary called “RiP! Remix Manifesto Documentary”. The documentary followed a DJ who created mash-ups which brought up many copyright questions and issues. The documentary was pretty intense and really made me think about what is considered copyright infringement…I had never thought about the fact that scientific ideas, such as the cure to cancer, fall under copyright laws as well.

After the documentary we debriefed in small groups and then as a whole class. We learned how to search for creative commons images on Google and it was super easy! After quickly changing the settings on Google Images we were able to see what photos we can reuse without getting into legal troubles. Don’t worry though…all the photos on my blog are allowed to be reused! In fact, some of them are my own photos. 😛

Following along with the topic of Open Educational Resources, we were introduced to a new website that provides teachers with a plethora of educational resources. The website was a little tricky to navigate at first and I think it was partially because we were just playing around. If I were a teacher looking for something specific to share with my class, I feel like it would be super easy due to the specific search options. One thing I noticed was that the curriculum was only linked to the American standards so as a Canadian teacher it makes it a little tricky. Beggars can’t be choosers though and I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to pull up the BC Curriculum and find what fits! Personally, I think that OER would be a super cool research tool to help students work on personalized inquiry projects. For example, if a student was interested in learning about the weather in different biomes, this would be a great activity to physicalize the weather! I chose this topic because I love learning about different habitats and ecosystems but in my elementary school all we ever did was create dioramas and that gets boring pretty quickly. I definitely will look into OER in depth before I begin my practicum this spring. 

See you next week! 🙂