ISKME's Open Educational Practice Rubric

This rubric defines a set of open educational practices that help educators to advance a classroom and school culture of open education and to advocate for the potential benefits of open educational resources (OER) in the context of continuous improvement. The rubric is intended to guide educator practice in working with OER to ensure that every student has the opportunity to engage in learning effectively. The rubric supports educators in accessing, curating, evaluating, and adapting OER in response to students’ particular needs, interests, and contexts, to author and share original or remixed resources, and to disseminate approaches to the implementation of those resources for future OER users to benefit from.

Material Type: Assessment

Author: Megan Simmons

OER Passport Training Program

OER Passport is a professional development program that takes educators through the process of understanding, finding, developing and sharing Open Educational Resources. This course trains teachers and students on OER use, reuse, licensing, creation, and sharing by completing the following tasks. The first three tasks lay a solid foundation and provide teachers with the tools to complete the last three tasks which focus on the use, reuse, production, and innovative teaching practices. Participants can complete the tasks online. There are also files to print/create physical copies of OER Passports that can be used in an offline environment.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Jenni Hayman

STEM Inquiry Lesson Template

This template supports STEM teachers and librarians in working collaboratively to create lessons that build science practice and STEM inquiry skills in alignment with state and national science standards, and that address the Common Core literacy shifts around close reading and building textual evidence.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Authors: Megan Simmons, Cynthia Jimes, Joanna Schimizzi, Letha Goger

Permissions Guide For Educators

This guide provides a primer on copyright and use permissions. It is intended to support teachers, librarians, curriculum experts and others in identifying the terms of use for digital resources, so that the resources may be appropriately (and legally) used as part of lessons and instruction. The guide also helps educators and curriculum experts in approaching the task of securing permission to use copyrighted materials in their classrooms, collections, libraries or elsewhere in new ways and with fewer restrictions than fair use potentially offers. The guide was created as part of ISKME's Primary Source Project, and is the result of collaboration with copyright holders, intellectual property experts, and educators.

Material Type: Reading

Author: Admin

Ontario College Libraries’ OER Toolkit

The OER Toolkit aims to improve equitable access to open learning resources and services to college students by providing a province-wide academic support platform for faculty to use while designing courses and assignments. The Toolkit is a one-stop guide to open educational resources, providing faculty and library staff with tools and information to understand, engage with, create, and sustain OER in their work and practice. The Toolkit is designed to be used by anyone involved with OER at an academic institution, whether you are part of a team that is collaborating to create OER, a library staff member who is supporting OER development and use, an advocate for OER at your institution, or an instructor seeking to incorporate OER and open pedagogy in the classroom. The primary purpose of this Toolkit is to support faculty and library staff at Ontario colleges; however, it is openly available for use beyond the Ontario college community.

Material Type: Module, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Colleges Libraries Ontario and the Ontario Colleges Library Service in collaboration with ISKME

OER Action Planning Worksheet.

Your action plan is an internal planning document for how you will convince key internal and external constituents to support for the work that you are doing. It is intended as a living document that you can revisit as you review the results of your advocacy activities and refine your advocacy strategy. Think of it as a skeleton you can work to fill in.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Liberty Public Schools

#GoOpen District Launch Packet (2017)

In 2022, the #GoOpen movement transitioned from a federal initiative to launch the #GoOpen National Network, a national community of educators and leaders who use and support open educational resources and practices (OER/OEP) to equitably improve teaching and learning for all. This resource offers enduring value and guidance for districts choosing to transition to the use of openly licensed educational resources to improve student learning in their schools. Openly licensed educational resources (OER) enable districts to reallocate significant funds currently spent on inflexible, static learning materials to resources and activities that accelerate the transition to digital learning. These include implementing new professional learning programs for teachers, developing a robust technology infrastructure to support digital learning, and funding new leadership roles for educators who curate and create openly licensed educational materials.

Material Type: Assessment

Grossmont Unified High School District General OER Rubrics

A rubric designed by the Grossmont Unified High School District to be used when assessing the quality of resources.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Author: Abbey Elder

Primary Source Exemplar: Nutrition and Human Rights

In this unit, students examine the question: How does access to a specific diet (nutrition) impact human rights? As students explore biological information on how the human body uses food as a source of energy, they will explore the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) document, to examine the crucial question of how access to a proper diet is related to a person’s rights.

Material Type: Lesson Plan, Teaching/Learning Strategy, Unit of Study

Author: Joanna Schimizzi

Primary Source Exemplar: Universal Declaration of Human Rights Social Science Unit

This document describes a series of lessons in the Social Sciences, all of which are tied to the exploration of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as a Primary Source Document. They are designed to be given to 9th or 10th grade students in a World History, Cultural Geography, or similar social science class. They are specifically designed to teach the Common Core Standards for Literacy in the Social Sciences, and to engage higher order thinking skills.

Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan, Primary Source, Reading, Unit of Study

Author: Wassim Absood

Measuring Human Rights: High School Mathematics Unit

In this unit, students will read and interpret primary sources to address the question “How do we measure the attainment of human rights?” By exploring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN’s Guide to Indicators of Human Rights, and data about development indicators from multiple databases, students will unpack the complexities of using indicators to measure human rights.

Material Type: Assessment, Lesson Plan

Author: Tamar Posner

Cross-Curricular Lesson Template - Building Textual Evidence

Building textual evidence through close reading of texts is a core proficiency addressed by the Common Core State Standards. This template is intended to support two or more educators in working collaboratively to create a cross-curricular lesson that supports students in honing their close reading skills, making inferences from texts, and constructing logical, evidence-based arguments. The toolkit was written for collaborative teams of ELA, Math and Social Studies or Science teachers, but can be used by other subject area configurations as well. The toolkit was developed by ISKME in collaboration with educators from 8 different states, who possessed varied subject area expertise.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Author: Cynthia Jimes

Using Data to Predict Life Choices

Using a literature review and primary sources that were part of the review, students examine data to evaluate if this data can predict future life choices. Students will learn content in Math, Biology and Language Arts during this literacy-based lesson that supports students in using textual evidence to develop and support claims.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Assessment, Homework/Assignment, Lesson Plan, Primary Source, Unit of Study

Authors: Joanna Schimizzi, Todd Rackowitz, Rob Leichner, Theodore Mueller, Jason Crawford

Literary Analysis Tool: Character and Theme

In this resource, students will be asked to use a graphic organizer in order to identify and track the development of theme and character in a literary text. Students will use evidence from the text to construct an evidence based response.

Material Type: Student Guide, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Authors: Erin Dorso, Brendan Johnson, Ambra Bryant, Sarah Reser, Bob Young

French Revolution

This tenth grade annotated inquiry leads students through an investigation of the French Revolution. Adolescent students are quite concerned with challenging authority and establishing their independence within the world; the concept of revolution brings those two concerns to their most world-altering levels. This inquiry gives students an entry point into thinking like historians about the French Revolution. The question of success invites students into the intellectual space that historians occupy. By investigating the question of the French Revolution’s success, students will need to make decisions about what the problems of the Revolution were, how to give weight to the events of three different periods of the Revolution, and what distance, if any, was between intentions and effects.

Material Type: Lesson, Primary Source

Author: New York State Department of Education

Needs and Wants

This annotated kindergarten inquiry focuses on the economics concept of scarcity by developing an understanding of needs and wants and goods and services through the compelling question, “Can we ever get everything we need and want?” The distinctions between these constructs serve as the necessary components of an examination of the choices people must make when faced with potential limitations.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Kitty Konundrum: The Environmental Impact of Feral Cat Reproduction

This lesson is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the feral cat issue in Hawaii. It incorporates problem-based learning to estimate cat reproduction, research the environmental impact of feral cats, and compose research-based arguments for solutions

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Authors: Sara Layton, Tamar Posner

Guide to finding openly-licensed texts (SLASL)

This guide provides information and resources to help educators find openly-licensed texts.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Authors: Michelle Brennan, Joanna Schimizzi

ISKME's Outreach & Advocacy Toolkit for Educators

This toolkit was created by ISKME to help educators to reach out and share the lessons they have learned, to transcend the boundaries of our schools through advocacy that engages fellow educators both online and in person.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

Authors: Amee Godwin, Megan Simmons, Cynthia Jimes