I’ll try to address both prongs of my work in this post:

1. Researching, evaluating and tagging Open Educational Resources into Home Base

2. Coordinating with DPI, presenting at conferences and creating the items featured here

1. Researching resources was a very time-consuming process. At first I loved looking for standards-aligned resources that facilitated deeper learning. Soon, it devolved into tedium. Most resources had to be passed over for one reason or another–they required a log-in, they had an ad for an M.Ed. program on the side, they didn’t give explicit directions on how to differentiate. It makes sense that it became arduous. Truly choosing a quality resource from the internet takes a lot of time and evaluation.

This experience has made me more cautious about the resources I borrow from others, and the resources that I create. Even for something as simple as a picture, I now must think through all its qualities and abilities before committing to it. I can only hope that going forward, some of the resources I’ve tagged save a teacher an hour of planning, inspire a lesson or a unit, or become the sought-after puzzle piece to a lesson to make it truly successful or memorable.

2. Partnering with DPI has been a great experience. I have always wondered what went on behind those walls, and I’ve had my assumptions. Now I know how nuanced and complications of what’s passed down from the state. DPI representatives aren’t always in full control of the situation. Many public and private entities affect what is eventually passed down to teachers, but DPI has to be the face of it. I know what it’s like to have to stand in support of something I’m not fully on board with yet and try and support it whole-heartedly–much in the way a teacher stands with administration on school procedures not always for her own beliefs but to present a unified front. While I have been required to delve early on into the features of Home Base as one of its ambassadors, I’ve seen the advantages of ‘early adoption’. The sooner you buck up and try something, the quicker you’ll find a way to make it work for you.

In the future, I hope my findings and presentations will have encouraged people to explore Home Base and see if it works for them before the July 15th Home Base deadline. Much in the same way I don’t care how people vote (although I certainly have my own beliefs) but believe they cannot bemoan their government if they don’t vote, I don’t care whether people opt into Home Base or not as long as they try it out. The vetted resources may not be worth the price tag for school systems, and they may have similar applications that help collect and display student data. A combination of programs may work better for an LEA than the single Pearson package, or Home Base may be the solution to all their problems. It doesn’t matter, as long as teachers try it out for themselves. I know I’ve influenced a history teacher and a curriculum coordinator from the Collaborative Conference on Student Achievement to experiment with creating an assessment in Home Base. I worked with my school’s IT manager to administer one of my assessments on my class of guinea pigs, and now we give at least one of our school’s benchmarks through the system. Hopefully I create more little ripples of influence in encouraging teachers to actively participate in evaluating the system and giving feedback.