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Re: [school-discuss] idea



Connexions ( http://cnx.org/ ) hosted by Rice University is sort of like an open source version of this site.  I personally would like to see teachers post educational videos on YouTube under a Creative Commons license, but then allow advertising so they can make a few bucks.  I have a 44 second animation about dyslexia that has 30,000 hits.  That has earned me over $100 bucks so far.  Not a lot - but definitely paid for the afternoon I spent creating it.  

I am always harping about dyslexia, but it is true that teaching videos are great for those kids.  This fall I am doing a bit of consulting for http://stemscopes.com.  It is online K-12 science curriculum offered by Rice University.  It is not open source, but they have made a commitment to accommodate dyslexic students and those with other disabilities as well.  In some of the materials I have created for teachers so far I talk about available free and open source software.

STEMscopes is quite a bit different from other systems I have seen.  It is not completely an online thing.  The classroom teacher is involved in facilitating student experiments and there is lots of live-action teaching.  The resources are online and ultimately will include text-to-speech, audio, or video for everything - as well as CC video - and braille accommodations.  

Hopefully it will become a model for other online coursework.

I appreciated Bill's and Laura's comments about the painful transition to digital learning.  Schools continue to be ignorant about technology.  The solution is always to throw a bunch of money at it.  Some of these expensive solutions are terrible for the children.  A couple that come to mind are Study Island and A+.  Making it more complicated are the large number of administrators who do not understand that the kids can't do anything if the network is down.

Ya-di-ya-di-ya . . . and so the story goes.

Marilyn  :)

On 24.09.2012 11:17am, LM wrote:

Ran across this article:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-24/how-a-teacher-made-1-million-selling-lesson-plans

Would be nice to have some Creative Commons or Open Source versions of
this.  If anyone knows some Open Source licenced sites that offer this
kind of thing, I'd like to add them to the Schoolforge.net wiki.

Sincerely,
Laura
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