Using & sharing digital resources

Ministry of Educati on

Ian Munro12 MARCH 2014

The current situation

Almost every day in every school, teachers create resources that already exist in the same, or different schools:• Some teachers can be very protective of their own resources – the

reasons may include:• Their results are good and they are confident their own material gives

them an edge over other teachers• They believe all teachers should have to prepare their own material• They do not want to risk having others criticise their work

Fortunately these attitudes are not as common as they were – but unfortunately they still endure.

Teaching is evolving with technology. Newer teaching styles encourage:• a more learner-centric approach; and• the breaking down of many of the older barriers to sharing.

The evolution

Moving into digital resources creates issues:• Storage – does an artefact have to be stored?

• where should it be stored?• can it be linked instead?

• Whose is it?

We often encourage students and/or staff to work collaboratively. This can cause intellectual property issues because many people have contributed to the creation of the artefact and ownership can be ‘fuzzy’.

We also encourage the 3R’s:• Re-use;• Re-mix; and • Re-purpose

The outcome can be an artefact or series of artefacts – unlike any of the original artefacts it was sourced from. And it can now be applied in a new or different way with a different emphasis, or purpose.

BUT whose is it?

Attitudes and IP

Traditionally, some teachers have had fairly casual attitudes towards intellectual property. Digital technology opens up availability, but is accompanied with its own problems.

• It is now very easy to locate and share resource material from around the world

• The digital world effectively sits on your (and your students’) computers• The ownership of digital resources can be very difficult to establish• Have your ever thought about the true ownership of your ‘own’ resources?

What has been your practice when you moved schools – did you assume you could take all your own resources and anything else you could lay your hands on?

Does your school have a policy covering resource ownership?

Many teachers find it difficult to accept that the Intellectual Property of material they create while teaching at a school is

actually the property of the school board

Sharing digital resources

BACKGROUND

In the February 2011 earthquake, many teachers lost temporary or permanent access to resources such as laptops, desktops, file-servers, portable drives, books, worksheets, lesson plans etc.• We were asked if replacement digital resources could be obtained from other schools

(not Christchurch) and made available online, particularly for examination year levels• We wanted excellent material so we talked to NZQA about identifying schools across

the country whose students had achieved consistently high results in NCEA over a period of years

Sharing digital resources

• We assumed that great results were most likely a combination of:• quality teaching;• good resources; and• the students themselves.

• As hoped, almost all schools wanted to help but a few came back with some interesting questions:• Would the resources be made available to any other schools?• How could we ensure file security once in the hands of the end-user?

• Other schools said:• “whatever you need we will make available”• “what a wonderful opportunity to create an online digital resources repository

for all schools”

– cont

Sharing digital resources – cont

Common difficulties emerged with nearly all schools – remember these schools had what everyone thought were excellent digital resources. They included:

1. Vagueness about the ownership of the Intellectual Property (IP)

2. The excessive number of file formats in the resources – some familiar and some quite unfamiliar

3. The excessive size of some files

4. The location of files with very similar, or identical, names in different places

5. Links that pointed to locations that no longer existed or locations outside the school’s access

6. The absence of any methodical organisation of the folders and files

7. The absence of a naming schema meant many file names were meaningless

Metadata

• Metadata is data describing context, content and structure of documents. With each document you can add-in ‘metadata’ which includes words and properties of a document that will help someone to search and locate it.

• In Word, you enter this under: File (or Office button) > Prepare > Properties and you have headings including: Subject, title, author, keywords, category, comments etc. This makes the document easy to find.

Schools and metadata

The use of metadata is not common in teacher-created resources• The search engine we used for Christchurch teachers to search and access the files

was based on the very powerful search engine from the Koha library package. (It searches mainly on metadata)

• The schools themselves were really surprised how long it took to put their resources together so that the files could be easily accessed and meaningful to other schools

• How easy is it in your school for a new teacher to locate relevant files?• What is the key data that would be needed to describe any file so it would be easy

to find and be the resource you were expecting?

Metadata

The key tags that we used included:• NZQA standard name• NZQA unit standard identification number• internal or external• subject• topic• level• author and or school• media type• licence type• resource type

• student worksheet, lesson plan, unit plan, course outline etc• This takes time while working on the file but enables any file to be quickly

searched for and correctly identified

What to think about – if you want to share resources

• Ownership and IP• How to organise folders• File naming and formats• Metadata• File type and storage• File location

Establish a Creative Commons licensing policy

Aim high

Don’t worry if you screw up the odd thing

It will soon be smooth sailing

Images courtesy of Ian Munro, licensed under Creative Commons – By attribution, share alike