Two months ago, I posted an announcement about an experimental professional development initiative, the EdTech Maker Space. The idea was this: 1) train educators on how to use popular edtech tools that we now more than ever need to be fluent in using to find or create engaging, mobile-friendly resources for our students; and 2) as part of that process, build openly licensed resources using those tools in such a way that educators both demonstrate proficiency with these tools while creating content that can be widely used by everyone.
Forty-five teachers from 25 states and the District of Columbia participated, and I’m beyond excited to share the results of their hard work! Join CrowdED Learning on Thursday, September 24 @ 4 PM Eastern to learn about how the project went, what was created, and lessons learned for future crowdsourcing endeavors.
Highlights of what you will learn about and immediately be leave being able to use are (see the sneak peek images below):
- 345 customizable and immediately shareable Wakelets, each of which includes a story (from Reading Skills for Today’s Adults), a Quizlet vocabulary study set for the story, and a Google Forms comprehension quiz for the story.
- A resource library for teachers to access the 345 Quizlets, 345 Google Forms, and 345 Wakelets, all of which can be shared as-is or copied and modified to use with your students as you see fit.
- A mobile reading app that includes all of the resources created by the educators, allows learners to find readings either by topics of interest or their levels, and allows learners to track what stories they’ve completed.
During this webinar, you’ll learn about how to use all of the great resources that have been created by the incredibly dedicated participants! More importantly, I’m hopeful learning about our first EdTech Maker Space project can trigger inspiration for you and your colleagues to find ways to use collaboration and crowdsourcing to get more quality, FREE mobile-friendly learning content into the hands of your learners.
Comments
Collaboration and crowdsourcing .. we can do this :)
Folks, this was such an awesome (and well-organized!) project to work on. (The story in the screenshots, "Safety in the Workplace," is one of the stories that I made the resources for and now I feel SUPER IMPORTANT, haha!) I hope there will be future EdTech Maker Spaces in the future, and I strongly encourage anyone reading this to participate!
If you're already familiar with the Reading Skills for Today's Adults and have used them in classes, the new resources make the stories really interactive and mobile-friendly. If you haven't used Reading Skills for Today's Adults before and you teach ESL or ABE/HSE students, you're missing out - this is one of the few reading resources out there that was actually written FOR adults, with topics and language choices appropriate for (and interesting to) adults at a range of reading levels. And it's free...we all like things that are free, right?