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Welcome to Open Education Week 2019!

March 4, 2019 Leave a Comment

March 4-8, 2019 is Open Education Week, an international event to build awareness of open education and show its impact on teaching and learning. Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness.* Read below to learn how to get involved during Open Ed Week.

COERLL Launches OER Guide for Language Teachers

This Open Ed Week, we are launching Introduction to OER for Language Teachers, a series of modules on topics related to creating and using open educational resources and practices. We developed this guide based on our conversations with teachers about open educational resources (OER) and practices (OEP) over the years. We hope these modules will help teachers who are interested in open education, especially pertaining to the use of Creative Commons licenses to share materials and ideas.

If you are already a user or creator of OER, or are planning on becoming one, please take a look at the guide, and let us know what you think!

Attend our Open Ed Week Collaborative Webinar

On March 6 at 1pm CST, COERLL will host a webinar where participants will break into groups to work on a task related to different aspects of OER: searching, licensing, remixing, creating, and sharing. All participants will come together at the end to share what they worked on and to find out how to continue their journey as open educators.

Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits available for teachers who attend the whole webinar. Register here.

Language OER Network is in full swing

Last year during Open Education Week, we launched the Language OER Network (LOERN), a showcase of teachers and students who are using, creating, and promoting open educational resources.

We’ve been thrilled to give digital badges to all of the people featured on LOERN: 82 faculty, teachers, librarians, undergraduate and graduate students from 50 different K-12 schools, community colleges and higher ed institutions, representing American Sign Language, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, K’iche’, Koine Greek, Korean, Linguistics, Persian, Portuguese, Spanglish, Spanish, and Yoruba.

Visit the LOERN page to join or read about your colleagues’ open work

Find other events for Open Education Week

You can discover other events around the world on the Open Education Week website. Here’s just a sample:

  • Learn about digital social reading in two different webinars about Perusall and Hypothes.is (these tools are similar to our tool eComma)
  • Take the daily Oregon OER challenge
  • Preview Trayectos, a Spanish open textbook project led by Dr. Gabriela Zapata and supported by COERLL
  • Join a global web conference
  • Listen to stories about OER in another language, for example this webinar about open projects in Uruguay

*Definition from the Open Education Consortium’s Open Education Week website, licensed under CC BY.

Filed Under: COERLL updates, OER initiatives, Teacher Development Tagged With: american sign language, Arabic, badge, Chinese, community college, conference, CPE, creating, digital social reading, English, framework, French, German, graduate, guide, Hypothes.is, introduction to oer for language teachers, Italian, K'iche', K-12, koine greek, korean, licensing, linguistics, LOERN, modules, network, OEP, OER, Open Education Week, Oregon, Persian, Perusall, Portuguese, remixing, searching, sharing, spanglish, Spanish, undergraduate, Uruguay, webinar, yoruba

A Program for Professional Growth Based on Collaboration

September 19, 2017 Leave a Comment

Over the past three years, COERLL has been working on several projects that require participation from language instructors; a new realm for a language center accustomed to making language learning materials with small teams of faculty and graduate students.

In order to jumpstart these participatory projects, we started a “COERLL Collaborators” program to mentor teachers and give visibility (and some funding) to their work, while spreading the use of open licenses and starting a network for our projects. Participants in the COERLL Collaborators program have helped COERLL tremendously over the past year or so, by testing and providing insights into our projects.

We piloted COERLL Collaborators for FLLITE (Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday), a project with CERCLL (Center for Educational Resources in Culture Language and Literacy) in which teachers write multiliteracies lessons around an authentic resource, receive peer review feedback, and have their lesson published on fllite.org. The FLLITE team chose three graduate students to go through this process, based on lesson proposals they submitted.

These lessons are now published on the project website for anyone to use, and exemplify how a teacher can transform their interests into a completely original lesson.

  • Natasha César-Suárez photographed an image from Spain’s 15-M movement and turned it into a lesson on language in social movements.
  • Marcelo Fuentes developed an image of a letter to God found in a Chilean church into a cultural lesson and letter writing activity.
  • Carol Ready used a poem by Pablo Neruda to teach students about the impact of commercial food production on Latin America through the study of descriptive language.

For our digital badging partnership with Austin Independent School District, which awards teachers digital badges for professional development based on the TELL (Teacher Effectiveness for Language Learning) Framework, we chose three more Collaborators. The three teachers agreed to attend professional development and personal mentorship sessions organized by Thymai Dong, AISD’s World Languages Coordinator, and to earn digital badges related to the topics of the sessions.

Unfortunately administrative changes stopped us from seeing this process through to the end, but the COERLL Collaborators still received some mentorship and challenged themselves to take risks and reflect on their teaching.

  • Rachel Preston developed her own professional growth plan based on a self-assessment of her teaching, which led to an increase in her students’ self-assessment, reflection and goal-setting.
  • Tania Shebaro got motivated at a workshop to scrap her lesson plans for the next day and rewrite everything, leading to engaging and participatory class sessions.
  • Janeth Medrano attended every professional development event possible to get new resources and tools she could adapt for her students.

Thank you to all six of our Collaborators – they have taught us, in addition to teaching their students!

Six more COERLL Collaborators are now busy perfecting some new FLLITE lessons in Spanish, Portuguese, Persian, and German, and we are narrowing down COERLL Collaborators applications for our Heritage Spanish project. We are looking forward to expanding the COERLL Collaborators program and building up a network of creative and collaborative language instructors.

See what the COERLL Collaborators have created:

  • Access the Spanish FLLITE lessons.
  • Read about the AISD teachers’ professional development experiences

Filed Under: Badges, COERLL updates, Instructional Materials, Teacher Development Tagged With: AISD, badges, COERLL Collaborators, Collaborators, digital badges, FLLITE, Foreign Languages and the Literary in the Everyday, German, lessons, Literacy, PD, peer review, Persian, Portuguese, professional development, Spanish, Teacher Effectiveness for Language Learning, TELL, TELL Framework

Best of MERLOT: Award-Winning World Language Resources

By Laura Franklin

March 19, 2013 1 Comment

In my last post, I blogged about the de rigueur French sites I share with my community college students through the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT). In addition to these, I must mention that there are almost 2,500 World Languages materials in MERLOT, not just in French, but in Arabic, Chinese, ESL, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish and many other languages. There are simulations, animations, blogs, word clouds, virtual art galleries and recording studios, tutorials, videos, webquests and worksheets. The cost is just a bit of your time.

One of the most effective ways to find the best of MERLOT is by exploring the recipients of our World Languages Editor’s Choice and MERLOT Classics Awards. The Classic Award winners are chosen among outstanding online resources designed to enhance teaching and learning. The Editor’s Choice Award is an honor bestowed on one excellent learning material among all the Classics Award winners. An easy way to peruse all the award-winning resources is to visit the About MERLOT Awards/Exemplary Materials page,  

Top 3 Editor’s Choice Recipients
  1. LangMedia consists of a collection of target language videos done by international students from the Five Colleges of Massachusetts in their home countries. Videos in languages from Arabic to Wolof are included with transcripts, images and realia. See videos of French as it is spoken in a variety of Francophone nations, Spanish in the Spanish-speaking world, etc. There is also a substantial Bangla/Bengali collection, Czech, Croatian and on through the alphabet of languages. In addition to the language videos, there are also CultureTalk series  that are coded for elementary, middle school and high school classes. These resources can enhance language courses anywhere or be used by prospective travelers to the regions.
  2. Ojalá que llueva café  is a timeless favorite of Spanish teachers and learners everywhere for its embedding of culture, grammar and structure. Completely in the target language, it not only contains a glossed reading of the popular song by Juan Luis Guerra, it features a beautiful photo gallery of the Dominican Republic and many exercises to teach the subjunctive in an engaging way. Author Barbara K. Nelson, went on to create many modules using a similar format in her five-star Spanish.language&culture site.
  3. Lingu@net Worldwide  (formerly Lingu@netEuropa) catalogues some 3,500 learning materials all geared toward learning languages. Linguanet Worldwide allows users to discern their learning styles, to find conversation partners and to locate resources to enhance their knowledge of the target language and culture. The resources it points to reach a wide and diverse potential audience: casual learners of languages in a variety of age groups, students of languages for professional or academic reasons and others.

I hope this tour of the best of MERLOT inspires Open Up readers to submit their own work to MERLOT World Languages and to comment upon what they find in our collections. For instance, what features do you want to see that are not already in MERLOT now?

—

LauraLaura Franklin teaches French online at the Extended Learning Institute, Northern Virginia Community College. She is one of the original Co-Editors of MERLOT World Languages. For information on becoming a MERLOT World Languages Peer Reviewer, contact Laura at lfranklin@nvcc.edu.

—

To find more OER for languages, see Open Up on Open Education Week.

Filed Under: Finding OER, Instructional Materials, Open education philosophy, Publishing OER, Remixing OER, Spanish, Teacher Development Tagged With: Arabic, Chinese, ESL, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Language learning, MERLOT, OER, Remix OER, Sharing resources, Textbook

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