The City of St. Charles R-VI School District ELA Proficiency Scale  6th Grade ELA Proficiency Scales

In 2012, water managers in Fredericktown, Missouri, saw their city's main source of water dwindle. They used the EPA’s Climate Ready Water Utilities program to consider options and develop plans to protect their water source.

This document might be a solid example of how carefully and collaboratively open resources may be curated by teams of educators.

I left the content in as the main example here, because the form itself is very simple. I have found that district leaders are sometimes interested early on in what it "looks like" to have teachers exert this level of agency over the resources they are curating in such an initiative. I think this can also be valuable for teachers new to the work. Knowing that their professional voice could be leveraged in such a way to create custom materials can be empowering.

Specifically, this tool used as a live form between a team of teachers co-editing a text-based resource on CK-12's platform for "flexbook" creation/curation. The work of alignment to standards and local curriculum was done in a collaborative face to face setting, and then the more fine-grained edits for specific content alignment, factual correctness, and vocabulary synchronicity were done asynchronously through forms such as this one.

Finally, it is important to note that a district curriculum and instruction expert in this area was also involved in vetting some of the edits you see suggested here.

This online, shared Diigo group is an example of one strategy for collaboratively archiving, aggregating, aligning and curating open and free resources. This group was actively used from 2014-2017 to supplement another team project to curate custom CK-12 Flexbooks for all Middle School Science modules. Items were archived and shared here to be vetted for inclusion by other faculty as well as district level Science Coordinators.Some of the advantages to using Diigo in this way are as follows:

Diigo allows an extension to be easily placed directly into the Chrome or Safari browser, thereby making it handy at the very point of discovery of the resource. There is no need to copy a URL and then go elsewhere to open another tool or service for entry. In working with faculty on such projects, we have found that limiting the number of steps between discovery of a resource and its ultimate inclusion in student-facing products is valuable.
This approach also allows a very transparent running archive for the entire team, allowing your content experts to do their thing in an effective manner.
Some of the details that make this effective are the ability to comment on submitted resources, thus generating a running conversation, direct editing of submissions for accuracy and alignment, etc.
We also utilized the ability to employ a common group dictionary of tags. This is important so that tags are useful and not splintered into many such as: “7thGrade,” “7th Grade,” “Seventh Grade,” and so on.
Annotation and markup is also available right at the point of discovery, and this markup also shows clearly in the running archive of the shared group.
The service is free to use, and even the group function is free as long as the group is public-facing. In the spirit of #GoOpen, this more than fits.
All of the work can also be exported for long-term archiving if this is a need.

One key thing to note, is that we actually used state standards as tags as well. At the time, this led to the potential for a very laser-focused conversation regarding whether or not resources truly facilitated work directly on the standard, or just “in the area of the standard,” which can be a concern at times. However, these were not NGSS standards at the time, and I want that to be clear. These are all solid resources for the application, but the alignment would certainly shift when cross-walking to NGSS.
(two sample screenshots below)

https://goopen.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screenshot-2019-04-10-11.15.51.pn

https://goopen.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screenshot-2019-04-10-11.17.23-1024x725.png

Liberty Public Schools uses Essential Standards, standards which are identified as to be essential to learning to meet our goal to provide the guaranteed and visible curriculum expected by our board of education.

For each essential standard, open the unwrapped document and check off the items as your team completes the vetting process. Once all essential standards have been vetted, each team member should sign (electronically) at the bottom of the page to confirm their acceptance of the curriculum and OER.

Students will examine tables of data from the 1820 Census to understand the implications of the Missouri Compromise, specifically in Maine and Missouri.

This is a recording of a webinar where K-12 and higher ed instructors shared what they learned from getting rid of their textbooks and developing original, openly licensed materials for their classes.