How to curate OER for your classroom Follow
In this article:
Create a collection of OER to supplement curriculum or differentiate instruction
Look for different types of media
Collaborate on your collection
Adapt OER to fit your team’s needs
Discover OER in Digital Backpack
Add OER to your Digital Backpack
There are tons of educational resources available online — and many are free for you to use, adapt and share with your colleagues. These resources are called open educational resources (OER). You can find OER in the form of lessons, units, literature, nonfiction texts, videos, audio clips, images, simulations, digital textbooks and more.
OER have many benefits for teachers. For example, OER are helpful when you need to:
- Supplement your current curriculum
- Differentiate instruction
- Engage students with different learning styles
- Bridge learning gaps
Although you can search for individual OER as needed during the school year, you can also curate a set of OER. You can prep this before the school year starts or add to your curated list over time. Once you have a set of OER, you can reuse the collection again and again to make instructional planning even easier and boost learning.
Create a collection of OER to supplement curriculum or differentiate instruction
Your state- or district-issued textbook may not fully cover every learning standard. As you assess students, you may find that they need more resources to practice a skill or understand a concept. In that case, you can curate a set of OER to fill in these areas.
For example, if you teach middle school science, you can create a collection of OER aligned to standards that your textbook quickly covers too quickly. After a formative assessment, you may see that your students need some more practice with a physical science standard. In Hāpara Highlights, you can then share the links to an OER video and a simulation from your collection to help students strengthen that skill.
Of course, as a teacher you also need to differentiate instruction to help each of your students succeed. But it can be challenging when you don’t have enough resources to support each student’s learning needs. This is another reason why curating OER is a great solution.
For example, if you have students with different reading levels, you can build a list of OER texts for each reading level. Then you can include those resources by group in a Workspace. Or if a student recently moved to your school and needs to review last year’s math standards, you can share OER from your curated collection to help them bridge their learning gap.
There are several sites where you can find OER for K-12. These OER sites are a great place to start. You can either search for a topic or search by grade level and subject to start curating your list.
Look for different types of media
It’s also important to support the different learning styles across your classroom. That’s not always simple, though, because it requires you to include different resources that cover the same topic. But because you can find OER in the form of various types of media, you can more easily appeal to different learning styles. By curating videos, articles, images, simulations, audio and other types of OER, you can engage students and create deeper learning opportunities.
You can include these OER resources in a Workspace and give students the option to view the resources they prefer.
Collaborate on your collection
You don’t have to curate your collection of OER all on your own! Collaborating with your department or grade level teammates makes the process much more manageable. By working together to search for OER, you can build a strong collection that everyone on the team can use. Plus, if a teacher later joins your team, the curated list will allow them to get started with instruction right away.
Adapt OER to fit your team’s needs
Many OER have licenses that allow you to adapt the resource. If that’s the case, you can make changes to best fit the needs of your instructional team and students. For example, you may want to:
- Add slides to an OER presentation
- Select part of an OER text and add additional information
- Add a formative assessment to an OER lesson
- Edit together two OER videos
Discover OER in Digital Backpack
Great news! If your school uses Digital Backpack, there are all kinds of OER available for you to save and use. Digital Backpack includes units of study, novels, textbooks and other classroom resources.
To get started with the Discover page:
1. Click Discover at the top of Digital Backpack.
2. Click a subject, a resource type or a standards group.
3. To search for a specific keyword, title or author, type in the search box.
4. On the left, you can also filter by subject, grade level, standards, resource type or license type.
5. Once you find an OER you want to save, click the star next to the resource.
Add OER to your Digital Backpack
If your school uses Digital Backpack, it’s also very easy to create a curated collection of OER so your team can access the resources at any time.
Digital resource managers can create OER collections in your school’s library. If you are a digital resource manager, learn how to create collections.
If you would like to upload OER that you find outside of Digital Backpack, please send it to your digital resource manager. They can then properly upload it as a PDF. When they do this in Digital Backpack, students will then be able to view the resource on any device. If you are a digital resource manager, learn how to upload OER.