Recently, the U.S. Department of Education and the White House hosted an Open Education Symposium and announced the launch of #GoOpen, a movement that aims to encourage States, school districts, and educators to use openly licensed educational materials. The ability to reuse, remix, and share openly-licensed educational resources allows teachers to exercise their own creativity and gives them the freedom to adapt and customize learning materials to fit their own teaching style and meet the needs of their students.
Here at NCTE, we’re happy to see others paying attention to something we’ve believed and promoted for years through ReadWriteThink.org.
The mission of ReadWriteThink is to provide educators, parents, and afterschool professionals with access to the highest quality practices in reading and language arts instruction by offering the very best in free materials. Users can take and use the materials as they see fit with children and students. Or, teachers and others can adapt them to their own contexts. An example of this comes from the lesson plan “A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words: From Image to Detailed Narrative”. The original lesson plan invites students and teachers to find a “Norman Rockwell”-type picture, i.e., any picture that is telling a story with people and a clear situation. Teachers who taught this lesson shared that they used the structure of the lesson plan, but used cutouts from Architectural Digest. The students wrote narratives of what they thought the story of the room was: why was it built, what went on there. Another teacher shared that he used a modified version of this lesson in a coaching collaboration with a Spanish 1 teacher.
We believe that this process of sharing, creating, and modifying free materials is best when it’s “by teachers for teachers”. The strongest resources we have on the site are those that have been classroom and student-tested!
Have you used any resources from ReadWriteThink.org? If so, how have you modified any of the resources you found on the site?