OER

Open Educational Resources really has my interest... I had heard of this term briefly before taking this class but not really known all of the definitions. The video that we watched explaining how Open Education would affect so many students made me wonder why anyone would not support this movement. If you have the students best interest at heart, this seems like a "no-brainer" situation to me. If schools all over the world can be giving all the students the same information and have a unified curriculum, I think that would be great. I can see textbook companies having a problem with this and all of the small curriculum corporations... but that shouldn't be a reason for not doing what is best for the students.

Right now a problem that my school is facing is that the curriculum between buildings and teachers is so different that the students are graduating with such different levels of education. We are also having students favor one teacher over another that teach the same content... how can this be if they are teaching the same class? Come to find out the teachers are making up the curriculum as they see fit and there is no uniform way of instruction or what is given to the students.

This gets tricky for my class because there is no curriculum at the state level for my class. My colleagues and I have made our entire curriculum based on what we think meets our content standards. If there was a resource for my class that was free and aligned with all other districts, I think that would be great. I can see how this could be difficult with pleasing so many teachers and people wanting to do it there own way, but it would at least give us somewhere to start. It is so hard making up a class from nothing.

This has not been brought up in our district yet but it wouldn't surprise me if this was something that was discussed.

Software Used

For this first Blog assignment we were asked to investigate a software application and explain why or why not we can use it in our classrooms. This discussion has perfect timing because my district has been battling with these issues for the past two years. I want to bring in some of my personal experiences with the licensing and distribution of Adobe software products, and also Adobe Certified testing.

In my classroom my students use the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. (I teach Digital Media Arts) This is the first year we are using CC (Creative Cloud) and there have been a lot of discussions and confusion regarding our licensing to use this product between 3 satellite locations. In the past my district has had to purchase the software and the software was only able to be used on the machines in my lab by students that were registered in my class. When Adobe came out with "the cloud" I was really excited! Does this mean my students will have access to Photoshop at home? All you need is a computer and the password right? We were told this would be possible... but it is not.

When my district purchased the CC Suite Adobe put restrictions on the machines and the amount of students that were able to access the software. Because of the package that was purchased my students are still not able to access these programs at home. I find it really frustrating that these software applications are becoming more reasonable ($30 a month for the entire suite!) and my students are still not getting the benefits of the switch. Other teachers and myself included were given this false hope that if we started using CC that our students would be able to access this from home and when it came down to it, they are not. This was something that was purchased out of my control and of course I wish there was more discussion with the teachers before this package was purchased.

Another form of licensing that I am dealing with this year is having my students sit for an Adobe Certification Test. My district is pushing for all of our students to be certified before graduation in one application from their program. We spoke to Certiport Testing and asked that our classrooms be considered testing sites... Again with the package that was purchased for our district there is much confusion on what we can and can not do. One school can have unlimited testing of practice tests and real tests, while another school only has so many pre-purchased tickets and when they use them up, they're gone. Again this was done out of my control, but the content of the class this week really has me thinking about this more and I want to do some investigation of my own...

A final comment on the copy-write laws is that this comes up in my class with using other artists work as your own. My students must take all original photographs and images because of these restrictions we learned about this week. I am sure that there are ways we could use images offline but I feel like that would not be teaching my students the valuable lesson of making your own work. This topic this week was really interesting to me and I'm glad I got to learn more about the details of what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.

Adobe Creative Cloud
Certiport Testing
 

Welcome!

My first personal blog!