Fall 2020 OER Training

I am sharing a link to one of the Nearpod presentations that has been added to eMedia by HawkWatch International. I'm sharing it for three reasons: It has been added as part of our Reimagine Teaching efforts and funding, it is an example of a resource from one of our great providers, and it is a Nearpod lesson. These are all types of resources I have been helping to curate in my job recently. Resource:

https://emedia.uen.org/courses/massive-migrations 

Hi Katie - This resource looks wonderful. Do you think most of your teachers have a Nearpod account? You can't see the resource unless you log in, so I wonder if that might be a barrier to some educators. Do you think any of the content would ever be remixed to be shared as non-interactive?

Joanna, all Utah educators have Nearpod accounts now through a state license, so we've been working to create a statewide library of quality lessons. So, no, I don't think we'll be remixing them since we specifically want them in that format for our educators. We have, however, encouraged teachers to submit their Nearpods as part of a complete lesson plan so others can see how it fits into their lesson plan as a whole.

I was looking for a resource on the sum of the exterior angles of a polygon.  I was hoping there was some kind of animation or visual that demonstrated the sum is always 360 degrees no matter the number of sides the polygon has.  I did not find one, but I did find a nice resource from Illustrative Mathematics that leads a students to discover the sum of the interior angles of a polygon.  It was well done, and drew on the student's prior knowledge that the sum of the interior angles of a trinagle is 180 degrees.  It also included both convex and concave polygons demonstrating that the 'formula' would work for either type.  Here is the link:  https://tasks.illustrativemathematics.org/content-standards/tasks/1124

Whenever a sudent can discover a mathematical formula on their own, they remember it better than if you just give them the formula and tell them they have to memorize it.  If they know how and/or why the pattern exists, they can recreate it if they don't remember the formula.  It's very powerful.

Amy - Wow! I love your explanation of the resource and how it is related to what you were looking for. I think this will be a really useful resource for lots of teachers. Do you think you could remix the resource to address your desired content standards and goal?

(Also, just dropping the UEN link to the resource -- https://emedia.uen.org/courses/sum-of-angles-in-a-polygon)

I searched, "alphabet chart," "alphabet," and "phonics" with no results. I then did an advanced search of "reading" and got many search results. I filtered the results to "lower elementary" and "ELA" and found a search result for Reading Fluency Activities. One of the activities within this resource that I was interested in using was the sight word flip it app. This app chooses sight words based on the skill selected and creates a word list for students to read. It provides support like blending for words that students struggle with. I really like how the app organizes the words based on spelling pattern because that is primarily how I plan my instruction. I plan to use this app with my older students that need something engaging. I feel like the use of technology would be exciting to them and they would be more attentive than with just flashcards.

https://emedia.uen.org/courses/reading-fluency-activities/view 

Frankly speaking, the resources listed on emedia for college-level mathematics OER is quite limited. Most of the materials like to Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseware, and Saylor Academy. Don't get me wrong. All three of these are great repositories of mathematical OER. eMedia just seems to be lacking much more than this. I did find a link the to College Algebra textbook by OpenStax, which is an open source textbook that I have used in the past for teaching College Algebra (Math 1050) at Southern Utah University. I highly recommend it. https://emedia.uen.org/courses/abstract-algebra-ii

Weston Woods Video Read Alouds of Picture Books

This is a link to video read aloud's of many popular picture books.   These are especially great because they often have a "caption" option in which the word is highlighted as it's read.   I work in a Spanish Dual Immersion school so it's also nice that there are several Spanish language options.  I show these in library lessons.