This week’s class had me considering the idea of free, open resources from a new perspective. My undergraduate experience was full of frustration over the accessibility of resources, whether they were articles behind paywalls or were sources I was hesitant to use because they did not offer enough information for a proper citation. I found this week’s exploration of open resources useful in terms of shifting my mindset away from focusing on what can’t be used to the wide range of resources that are available.
(I don’t understand this photo but I love it)
I have come across a number of excellent open resources in other classes, so I thought I would use this blog post to share a little bit about them.
As part of a social studies “Super Resource” project, I found the website Law Lessons which provides a multitude of law and civics related educational resources in addition to an entire Law course worth of detailed lesson plans. The great thing about this resource is that it has been created by the Justice Society of BC with specific consideration to the BC curriculum.
I was also introduced to a website called ReadWriteThink in my Language Arts curriculum class, which is a massive database of resources and lesson plans of all subjects.
In addition, I have been introduced to some simple teaching tools that are far simpler to use than I expected. I was particularly surprised by how easy it was to embed photos from flickr into materials (like these blog posts). I also had the opportunity to learn how to use the program twine, which was shockingly simple to navigate even for someone like me with virtually no knowledge of coding.
A major concern I had when exploring the new curriculum was what I would base lessons on given the shift away from prescribed content. However, I have quickly learned that all the resources I could need are out there, and are far easier to find and use than I would have anticipated.
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