This panel discussion provides insights into the variety of ways that four educators who work in areas of teacher development and training have drawn on creative OER ideas over the last several years. Ways that institutional support provided infrastructure for creation and implementation of OER will be explored and discussed including: participation in an open education Professional Learning Community (PLC), use of library-based trainings and workshops taught by an open education librarian, and informal backchannels, social media, and digitally-based conversations to share ideas about OER with each other and colleagues. We define open education as an open sharing for education.
The first panelist will inform how science teacher candidates integrate interactive OERs to teach science. Teaching with the interactive OERs provides educational resources that successfully help to teach diverse students in science classrooms. The participants will have a list of the interactive OERs and a rubric to evaluate the various OERs for teaching science.
The second panelist will share about the recent growth of OER resources for ESL teaching, specifically for university level academic ESL. In addition, resource curation will be discussed as a knowledge-building activity that supports the ideals behind open resources, and provides ESL teachers with a wealth of relevant resources at their fingertips. Participants will gain access to some examples of student-curated resources and suggestions for helping students curate their own resources effectively.
The third panelist will discuss ways to use OERs to support virtual, hybrid, and face-to-face teaching in K-12 classrooms. Examples of teacher and student learning from the Mobile Maker Kits project, an OER providing interdisciplinary, standards-based making lessons, will be shared. Participants will engage in brainstorming goals for creating and sharing OERs for interdisciplinary teaching and learning.
The fourth panelist will share ideas related to creation of multimodal open access content through using podcasting and video (YouTube). Ways that the university-based Professional Learning Community helped support the creation and implementation of the microlearning podcast creation project will be outlined as well as the ways that the panelist sought out her own models of multimodal OERs provided progress in the creation of these resources and remixing in literacy teacher education.
Learning Outcomes: Participants will learn about the ways that OER integrates into teacher education and training across multiple disciplines (teacher education, linguistics/TESOL, science education, and literacy education). Participants will consider and reflect on the ways that institutional support (such as Professional Learning Community and OER Librarian support) provides opportunities for development of implementation of open access education and resource integration into courses as well as all disciplines
Assistant Professor of Instruction, University of Texas at Arlington
Cynthia Kilpatrick is the graduate advisor for TESOL at The University of Texas at Arlington, and the Interim Director of UT Arlington's English Language Institute.
