Teaching Approaches/Adapting and sharing resources: Difference between revisions

=Introduction to OER, Creative Commons, and Open Government Licence=

=Adapting and Sharing our Resources=

The ORBIT materials are OERs. This means that they can be freely shared, adapted and used by anyone.  

* To what extent do teacher educators at my institution work together?

* How could I benefit from increasing this collaboration?

* How can you share your ORBIT experiences with others who work with teachers in schools and in your local community?  

# Select an appropriate theme or teaching approach that you’ve identified as needing attention, or which is on your curriculum/scheme of work for the next few weeks – this might be one which you find particularly challenging to teach, one which your learners have struggled with or a new way of teaching that you want to try out.  

# Locate and review relevant ORBIT materials to identify suitable sections which match your chosen theme, topic or skill.  

=Copyright=

==How to Stay Within the Law==

In most circumstances, works protected by copyright can only be used – and ‘used’ can mean copied, scanned, distributed, stored, adapted, broadcasted or shown - in whole or in part with the permission of the owner. You are personally responsible if you use material without having the necessary permissions and could face prosecution and a hefty fine. You also have a moral duty to act as a good role model to the students in your care in order to help them recognise the importance of keeping legal.

In some cases, obtaining this permission results in a fee being charged and obtaining permission can be time consuming. Our focus within this course is on identifying resources that you can use free of charge and don’t need to seek further permission to use. However, in order to be able to do that you need to know a little more about copyright.}}

* What copyright information can you find out about it?  

* What can you ‘do’, legally, with this information, in terms of re-using it?

Like printed materials or works of art, everything published on the web is protected by copyright, even if it looks as if it is ‘free’ information. The rules on copyright, which are already complicated, become more complex in an online world, because it is so easy to copy and transfer electronic information to other people.

There are exceptions to the copyright rules which allow you to do a little more with material you find within your teaching than in other contexts.

Using material you find on the web has been made easier in recent years through Creative Commons, which provides a system of licensing to enable people to share and re-use information easily.

Play this video from Creative Commons for a brief introduction.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DKm96Ftfko A shared culture]

Creative Commons extends and works alongside copyright to enable people to share their work. This works well for us as consumers of information because it expands the amount of information available for us to re-use.

Flickr is a site for sharing photographs. The advanced search options in Flickr enable you to search within Creative Commons licensed content. You can restrict your search according to what you ultimately want to do with what you find. For example, you can search just for images that you can edit. This is a quick and easy way to ensure that you find material quickly which suits your purpose.  

* Do the same search on ‘digital native’. How many items did you find this time? What you can ‘do’ with this material?  

When we did this search, there was a significant difference in the number of hits and what we were able to ‘do’ with the content we found. Restricting the search to only those items licensed under Creative Commons reduced the number of hits from 7000+ to around 1000, and what we could do with the material found was much less restrictive. However, you do need to be careful because of the different sort of Creative Commons licences, most of which do require that you give appropriate attribution for the images you use (e.g. if you are including an image in a presentation you may also have to include the url where you found the image).  

Like Flickr, Google’s advanced search options enable you to filter your results according to what you ultimately want to do with what you find.  

* Search for material on a topic of your choosing. Write down the search term that you are going to use.

* Now select ‘Advanced search’. Under ‘Usage rights’, note the range of options in the drop-down menu for restricting your search.

Click on a few of the items to look at what you can do with the material.  

Searching in this way is a good idea in two respects – it reduces the number of items you have to deal with and ensures that you get material which you can reuse. For example, when we did this search, using the word ‘fish’, and restricting the results to those ‘labeled for reuse’, we were able to reduce the hits on Google images from over 104 million to a more much manageable 500.  

When looking for material to use in the classroom, using ‘reliable, high quality’ sites to start with can take some of the guesswork out of finding resources that can be re-used legally. The objective of this course activity is to revisit the sites you normally use, and review them to see whether they are good sources of legal-to-use information.

=Wikis=

So what is a wiki? A wiki is a website for sharing and developing ideas, materials, plans etc. Any page of the website can be changed by anyone (sometimes usernames and passwords are needed, sometimes edits can be anonymous). Only one person can edit any one page at one time but as soon as they have finished and saved, anyone else can then edit it.  

Wikis are gaining popularity with teachers who recognise its power as a creative and collaborative tool. Teachers are exploring ways of integrating them into their teaching and learning. Some are sharing examples of pupil work, others are encouraging pupils to contribute to a class wiki.

{{:Sharing ideas - developing wikis (primary)/Resource/Table2}}

The structure of any wiki used in a learning context may well be derived from the way in which learning is structured in classrooms with groups and tasks represented by different wiki pages. On the other hand the use of a wiki allows for learning and sharing to go on over time, not constrained by ‘the lesson or session’, and to go on over space not constrained by the physical buildings.  

By looking at other examples of wikis and seeing what other people are doing and thinking about how to use wikis, you will be able to generate ideas about how you might structure and use a wiki to suit your own context.  

You might like to look at these further resources

* ‘[http://www.vital.ac.uk/community/mod/resource/view.php?id=1205&direct=1 Collaborative learning the wiki way’] Engström and Jewett (2005) - available [[file:Collaborative learning the wiki way.pdf| here]]

* [http://www.vital.ac.uk/community/mod/resource/view.php?id=1209&direct=1 ‘The potential of wikis in the classroom’] Fountain (2005) - available [[file:The potential of wikis in the classroom.doc| here]]

* [http://www.vital.ac.uk/community/mod/resource/view.php?id=1206&direct=1 ‘The good, the bad and the wiki’] Wheeler, Yeomans and Wheeler (2008) - available [[file:The good, the bad and the wiki.doc| here]]

{{adaptedfrom|Learning together introducing wikis/Resource|BECTA|In 2008, Becta published the results of a study of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Key Stage 3 and 4 classrooms. You can access this report [[file:Becta report.pdf|here]], or in editable (.doc) format [[file:Becta report.doc|here]]. This is a lengthy report covering all aspects of Web 2.0 tools (including social networking and blogging) but there are some sections that focus on the use of wikis.Go to page 20 of the report for statistics relating to teacher perceptions of wikis and experiences of their use in the classroom. Reflect on the final bullet point that relates to use of wikis and their management. Think about whether wiki management could be an issue for you and your learners and how you might deal with this, for example, creating wikis for smaller groups and introducing a code of conduct. Add to your notes from the previous activities any further thoughts arising from your reading.

Go to page 34 and read the section that considers the issues of private versus collaborative learning. An important point is made here about some learners who prefer their own private space for learning and therefore find it difficult to engage in collaborative activities. Reflect on whether any of your learners may have this preference and could find collaboration through a wiki to be difficult. Could you encourage such learners to become involved by careful selection of a small group of students to work on a wiki-based activity? Again, add any thoughts you have to your notes.}}