English was the subject, Experilab was the venue! Last night was our second last evening event for teachers in the Northern Suburbs, and with a gathering of nine English teachers present, there was some good conversation as everyone enjoyed some snacks and refreshments.
We decided to do things a little differently at this event, with Carine and I presenting part of the content for the first time! It was an exciting experience for us to take to the “stage”, and be the ones talking about the world of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Siyavula. We had two guest presenters scheduled to speak, but unfortunately both had to cancel, so Neels stepped in and presented on some resources that English teachers may find useful.

Our presentation covered the concept of “openness”, and as Siyavula means “we are opening”, it is central to what our organisation stands for. If something is open it means that it is free i.e. you don’t have to pay for it to use it. But if it is under an open copyright licence (such as a Creative Commons License), it means that you are granted the freedom to share the resource, to adapt, enhance, print and distribute the resources. It is even better if the resource is stored in an open standard (such as on the Connexions website), as you can then take advantage of the freedoms granted to you by the open copyright licence, and actually access the content in a format where you can edit it to better suit your needs.

The OER movement is an education revolution that is gaining momentum, both internationally and locally. This is demonstrated through the world renowned educational institute MIT, who has released all their course material under a Creative Commons open copyright license and made it freely available online. It includes video lectures, course notes and much more, allowing anyone from anywhere in the world to have access to it. Other examples of organisations involved in this movement are CK-12 Flexbooks, OER Commons, Connexions, Khan Academy, to name but a few. But it’s not just large organisations that can contribute OERs, individuals are a huge part of this movement too, in particular teachers that are seeing the value in sharing the resources that they have created. One such individual is Dan Meyer, a maths teacher in America, who constantly creates resources for his maths classroom which he posts on his blog. He uses his cellphone or camera to create exercises, with the subject being everyday experiences and everyday things.

He has found that when he shares an activity on his blog, before he knows it another teacher has accessed it and built upon his idea, and then shared with him how they changed and improved it. This is truly the benefit of OERs – sharing and building on each other’s work, to create educational resources of a high standard, and avoiding duplication in the creation of resources for the same learning area.

Teachers locally are sharing too – Keith Warne, the HoD of Physical Science at Bishops has shared his teaching slides on SlideShare, thus enabling any teacher to use his locally produced material in their own classroom too. And how great that teaching resources in a top private school can be accessed online and used by teachers in under-resourced schools, all because they have been shared on the internet. That is the power of OERs and technology.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration was signed here in Cape Town, and it is a statement of principle that encourages dialogue and inspires action to push for the open education movement to grow. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customise, improve and redistribute educational materials without constraint. It has been signed by 2211 individuals and 233 organisations, so far.

We encourage teachers to share their teaching resources as it means that individuals’ expertise is opened up to the world, where additional people can contribute to the work and adapt it to their own country, school or learner need, and thus create a powerful resource which can be further shared. The internet provides a modern take on this notion of sharing: in the past, teachers would get together and form communities where they would share test papers and mix them up, literally cutting and pasting question papers shared by other teachers to create a new test or exercise, which would then be photocopied for the next year’s class. The internet and free online tools makes this process of customisation easier, but essentially it is the same thing – just a modern take on it.

Enter our website – FullMarks. Siyavula offers a free and open online assessment bank for the sharing and accessing of curriculum-aligned test and exam questions with answers. This site enables educators to quickly set tests and exam papers by selecting items from the library and adding them to their test. Educators can then download their separate test and memo which is ready for printing. FullMarks further offers educators the option of capturing their learner’s marks in order to view a selection of diagnostic reports on their performance. Our goal is to have every grade and every subject populated with questions and answers. Right now we are short of English content and would love it if any English teachers would like to upload some of their teaching materials to FullMarks, and join the open education movement.

Neels gave an overview of Yoza – a former Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow’s mobile literacy project. People can access m-novels (a story published on a mobile phone) and read stories via their cellphones on MXit. It costs about 5c to read a chapter, and the response has been phenomenal. The stories cover issues that teenagers can relate to – romance, adventure, teen issues, and include poetry and Shakespeare classics. Through the project, Steve has made the problem of teens being on their cellphones part of the solution. There has been up to 121 000 reads of Yoza m-novels, a huge number when you consider that it can be soo hard to get young people reading. South Africa is book poor but cellphone rich – we need to embrace this, and as Steve says “go fishing where the fish are!”.

While we understand that many schools have banned cellphone use at school, perhaps a cellphone reading assignment could be set as homework. A teacher could instruct learners to do a book report on a Yoza story, to review the comments that people leave at the end of each chapter as an analysis of the whole experience. Alternatively, a teacher could upload content to Connexions, which learners could then access via their cellphone after hours, and complete an assignment in that way (be it just using Connexions to read content, or actually interact with it on the website).

Neels touched briefly on Good Reads, a website that has a huge database of books (over 120 000 000 books added!). On the site you can create your own group specific to your English class and the books you are reading. There’s a discussion board for discussions within the groups, where as a teacher you could post a question and your learners could comment on it. On Good Reads you can also do book reviews of set works for instance, and once the review has been shared, it can be viewed and commented on. There is a large selection of groups that can be joined that cover a wide range of reading groups from a variety of group categories e.g. books and literature; entertainment and arts; student groups (although student groups are specific to learners from a particular school and English class, that you only join if you are in that class – more of a private group that you have to be invited to join). For more information you can see our review of the website here.

Neels then showed a video from IDEO on what they see as the future of the book. You can view it here. It is amazing what can be done with technology and how the book as we know it can be totally transformed into a whole new reading experience.

Technology exists to make your life easier, but as there is so much out there, and so many different platforms you can use, you need to incorporate it into your teaching in whichever format you feel most comfortable. Be it getting your learners to create and maintain a blog for their English assignments, filming a book review and using an online tool to edit it, or even giving them reading assignments on Yoza or Connexions that they access via their mobile phones after hours – bringing technology into your teaching in this way will provide a more stimulating lesson for learners, but also help keep you as a teacher in the technology loop.

Next week is our final evening event in the Northern Suburbs – Life Sciences on Thursday 17 March. We hope to see you there!

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