Open Education Resource Content

My director, Marilyn Ault, passed this list of Open Education Resource content or OER around our office.  These are free lesson plans, videos, interactive activities, etc that help K-12 educators teach specific concepts.  With the Common Core standards being implemented, sites like these will only become more prevailant as more and more people are teaching very similar content.

These are derived from the Intel document entitled: Blueprint Solutions - Digital Content in the K-12 Classroom and can be downloaded in it's entirety here: http://www.k12blueprint.com/k12/blueprint/cd/CDE06_BlueprintSolutio... 

Open Source and Open Education Resource (OER) Content for K-12:

• BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium (http://bioquest.org)
These open educational resources are designed to help high school and college students study biology
by posing and solving problems and communicating with peers.

• CK-12 Foundation (http://ck12.org/flexr/)
Using an open-content web-based collaborative model, CK-12 allows users to create customized
“FlexBooks” that take the place of traditional textbooks. The state of Virginia worked with CK-12 to
develop a 21st Century Physics FlexBook and the California Free Digital Textbooks Initiative listed a
number of FlexBooks in its review of free alternatives to textbooks.

• Connexions (http://cnx.org/)
One of the first OER resources, Rice University’s Connexions offers mostly higher education content but
also some high school materials. Content is available in modules (“knowledge chunks”) and collections of
modules grouped into courses.

• FreeReading (http://freereading.net)
Adopted by the state of Florida in 2008 as a state-approved K-3 supplemental reading program,
FreeReading is an open source early literacy program with free research-based lessons from a variety of
sources.

• Hippocampus (www.hippocampus.org)
An open education project from the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, Hippocampus
offers multimedia lessons and course materials to high school and college students free of charge.

• The Math Open Reference (http://www.mathopenref.com/)
This free interactive math textbook prototype covers high school geometry and plans to expand to other
areas of math. The interactive books promise to include text, interactive quizzes, digital manipulatives
and more.

• Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/)
Wikibooks is a wikimedia community for creating free education textbooks. Some examples of particular
interest to K-12 include: High School Mathematics Extensions, Geometry of Elementary School, and basic
Spanish and Physics classes.