LibGuides: Professional Resources: Home

Resources for Teachers

While it is not the business of education … to teach every possible item of information, it is its business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions.

John Dewey, How We Think, 1909.

On this page:

International Baccalaureate
Independent School Organizations
Open Educational Resources
Open Education Resources / Amazon Inspire Beta
Participate Learning: Curating with Communities

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits sharing, accessing, repurposing—including for commercial purposes—and collaborating with others. They include educational materials, such as lesson plans, games, textbooks, tests, audio, and video. In addition to being free, these no-cost teaching and learning materials are available online for anyone to use, modify or share with others.

The collections listed below may be searched by different criteria including subject, grade level and common core alignment.

NOTE: different levels of "openness" are represented. Many resources have a Creative Commons or other type of open license, while others are in the public domain. They fall into one of four categories:

View online only
Download by individual user
Download and share unaltered resource
Download, share, and edit resource

Be sure to check the license agreement on each resource to understand your level of permissions.

Curriki
Curriki is a nonprofit K-12 community of over 10 million global users. Teachers, students, and parents use it to create, share, and find free learning resources. The Curriki library hosts thousands of educator-vetted, openly licensed, online educational materials that teachers, educators, or other professionals have created and have made freely available to others for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing.
Georgia Virtual Learning Shared Resources
The content available on the Georgia Virtual Learning Shared Resources website is available for anyone to view, and is provided by the Georgia Department of Education Virtual Learning (online education) department. Materials uploaded may be subject to posted limitations on usage, reproduction and/or dissemination. Navigate through the Georgia Virtual Learning Courses by selecting a Subject Area and then Course.
HippoCampus
HippoCampus.org is a free, core academic web site that delivers multimedia content--videos, animations, and simulations--on general education subjects to middle-school and high-school teachers and college professors, and their students, free of charge. Teachers project HippoCampus content during classroom learning and assign it for computer labs and homework. Students use the site in the evenings for study and exam prep. Users do not need to register or log in to use the site.
OER Commons
The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) created OER Commons to provide support for and build a knowledge base around the use and reuse of open educational resources (OER). As a network for teaching and learning materials, the web site offers engagement with resources in the form of social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing. Search through digital collections of educational resources, organized on topics such as 'Citizen Science for Learning & Research', 'Arts Integration', 'Featured STEAM OER', and 'Language Learning'.
OpenEd
Large selection of free educational resources for K-12 students and teachers, including assessments, homework assignments, videos, games and lesson plans. OpenEd's resources contain both free and paid resources, with over 90% free. Since resources carry many different licenses, check for permitted usage.
OpenStax CNX
OpenStax CNX is designed to encourage the sharing and reuse of educational content. It houses tens of thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device. All content is available under a Creative Commons open-content licenses.
The Orange Grove (Florida's Open Educational Resource Repository)
Resources for K-12 from the State of Florida, organized by subject (Engineering & Technology, Humanities, Mathematics, Science, Social Science, and others). Use the Filter pull-down menu to define searches within this collection.
PBS Learning Media
PBS LearningMedia provides PreK-12 educators with access to free digital content and professional development opportunities designed to improve teacher effectiveness and student achievement. The site has thousands of media resources, support materials, and tools for classroom lessons, individualized learning programs, and teacher professional learning communities. Non-commercial, educational use of content on the site is made available to users under four levels of permitted uses: online view only, download, download and share, download, share and remix. See specific resource for licensing rules.
Share My Lesson
Search more than 300,000 free lesson plans Pre-K – 12, find news stories and lesson supplements from PBS Newshour Extra and Listen Current. Content partners include Lee and Loew Books, MIT Blossoms, NBC Learn, and PBS Newshour Extra. Funded by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Open Educational Resources / Amazon Inspire Beta

Amazon Inspire, with its features such as search, discovery and peer reviews, will provide educators access to upload and share free digital teaching resources. In addition to teachers sharing innovative instructional resources, publishers and other content developers are contributing digital educational resources to Amazon Inspire, including the Newseum in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Amazon Inspire is in the beta stage and is ready for teachers to use and provide feedback. Note: At the present time access to Amazon Inspire requires an invite. You can request one here. (Click the 'Request Access' button and fill out the form.)

Amazon Inspire Features

Smart search — With smart search, teachers can explore resources by grade level or standard. Educators can filter search results using more than 10 criteria to find great resources that best fit their needs.
Collections — Educators can group resources into collections. They can describe the collection, curate the resources in it, recommend an order for going through the resources and share the collection with other teachers.
Simple upload — Amazon Inspire offers an easy to use and intuitive upload interface. Educators can drag and drop files they want to share, add basic metadata such as title, description, grade and subject, and publish the content on the service, all in a few minutes.
Customer reviews — Teachers can rate and review resources on Amazon Inspire, helping their colleagues around the country select the best resources for their needs.
Accessibility support — Amazon Inspire has built in accessibility features. For example, educators can navigate Amazon Inspire using popular screen readers and users are also able to indicate the accessibility features of resources they upload.

Participate Learning: Curating with Communities

The Participate Learning search engine offers access to thousands of educator-vetted K12 learning resources–apps, videos, and websites - that can be accessed and downloaded from the Participate Learning platform. Features include:

Expert reviews - judged by a rubric focusing on Educational Content and Function, Features and Production Value, and Engagement. Reviews also provide examples of classroom use.
Collections - Users can create and collaborate on collections, curated groups of educational resources around themes or topics or, perhaps, around the tools used for a particular discipline or a lesson to share with students, colleagues and parents. The platform is very handy for staging content or tools to remember for later use. Educators may add any digital resources and personal files to their collection, even if they are not in the ParticipateLearning search engine.
ParticipateChat - a resource linking to twitter hashtags and live twitter chats. You can browse for live chats by date or browse an alphabetical list of hashtags to follow, with links to moderators, participants and feeds.

Participate Learning
The Participate Learning platform delivers thousands of apps, videos and websites – professionally vetted by expert teachers - that are searchable by keyword, category or Common Core State Standard. Additionally, any teacher can create and share Collections of their own favorite apps, videos, websites, or files (either web-based or uploaded) around a specific subject or lesson plan.

International Baccalaureate® (IB)

International Baccalaureate® (IB)
Founded in 1968, the International Baccalaureate® (IB) is a non-profit educational foundation offering four programmes of international education that develop the intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills needed to live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world.
Online curriculum centre (OCC)
Provides resources for IB teachers and coordinators; access requires West Sound Academy's IB school code and individual username and password.
IB Answers
Website where families, IB teachers, and faculty can look for answers to questions on all aspects of the IB Programme ( IB Students & Graduates, Diploma Programme, Professional Development, Finance, IB Websites, Fees & Services) or submit new questions; full access for IB teachers and coordinators requires login with username and password.

Independent School Organizations

National Association of Independent Schools
The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) is a nonprofit membership association that provides services to more than 1,800 schools and associations of schools in the United States and abroad, including more than 1,500 independent private K-12 schools in the U.S.
Northwest Association of Independent Schools
The Northwest Association of Independent Schools (NWAIS) is an organization representing 111 independent school education in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. NWAIS schools serve students of all ages, skill levels, and incomes with a huge variety of educational strategies.

News from NWAIS (Northwest Association of Independent Schools)

How do I get something put on this guide?

If you have a good article to include in this guide or if you have been to a good PD lately then share with the rest of the WSA faculty. Email the documents or links or your 'Top Tips and Tricks' to

strower@westsoundacademy.org

and they will be added. Thanks!

Librarian

Susan Trower

she/her/hers

Email Me

Contact:

West Sound Academy
16571 Creative Drive NE
Poulsbo, WA 98370

360-598-5954