OER Teachers' Network

Event: Open Education Resource Forum
Dates: April 15th-17th 2009
Location: Brussels, Belgium
Organisers of the event: European Schoolnet
Sequencing of the event: Feasibility workshop

Highlights of the event
Meeting geographers and historians from around the world and discussing issues such as:

One idea I have form the Brussels workshop is to test if some teaching material (courses, units,..) packed in moodle "travells well"

The inspiration came to me from the OpenLearn initiative from the Open University (funded by the Hewlett Foundation). Of course, there are big differences, they are directed to the higher education sector,...

In order to test the travell well concept I'm going to use an astronomy unit developed inside a European project (ISSUE) which got a European elearning award

In April, 15 teachers from several EU countries, Australia, Africa and the US attended a three-day workshop in Brussels to better understand how reusable Open Educational Resources (OER) from one country can be shared and used by teachers elsewhere. In the words of one of the delegates,

Today, 23 April, I met up with the Gauteng Geography teachers' committee to dissuss setting up an independent association for geography teachers for Southern Africa, one not linked to an examination board or to a tertiary institution. I proposed setting up a website for our shared digital resources and assessments and a mailing list to share useful "travelwell" resources. Until now, our resources have been burnt onto DVDs and posted to contributing teachers.

The list is in the attachment as a Word file.

After the session of this afternooon, we talked about programming classes with the Zambia colleagues. We spoke about Logo (a nice programming environment for children - http://hlrnet.com/tecprlogo.htm) and Visual Basic Express edition (a free programming envoironment from Microsoft - http://hlrnet.com/vb.htm)

Moodle is a very nice free LMS learning Management System
I have a lidt at http://hlrnet.com/ctodl.htm

Related to that are the authorware http://hlrnet.com/aw.htm with programs similar to HotPotatoes http://hlrnet.com/hp.htm

As for blog systems I like very much www.wordpress.com
You can install it on your own server, it's free software - If you need hosting, I have hosting for 5USD/m
There is also a multiuser version

More blog software on http://www.hlrnet.net

As a possibility for sharing documents, I'm a fan of http://skydrive.live.com/

Klascement http://www.klascement.net doesn't have an English interface - yet

There are open source materials listed in several specified search engines. I have a little list at http://www.hlrnet.com/ctles.htm

There are several tools to store and share bookmarks http://www.hlrnet.com/intbookm.htm

There are several tools for collaboration http://www.hlrnet.com/intcoll.htm