{"id":740,"date":"2010-03-23T09:26:21","date_gmt":"2010-03-23T13:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/?p=740"},"modified":"2012-09-27T10:37:32","modified_gmt":"2012-09-27T14:37:32","slug":"wikieducator-empowering-teachers-with-elearning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/elearning-promise\/wikieducator-empowering-teachers-with-elearning\/","title":{"rendered":"WikiEducator: Empowering Teachers with eLearning"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the problems with education in the developing world is that many teachers get very poor resources to work with. If they are lucky enough to get text books, they are usually second hand and from a developed country whose education system is quite different from their own.<\/p>\n

The high costs of producing appropriate teaching resources means that teachers often have to do without. Now the WikiEducator project is working on this. You all know about Wikipedia. Well, this is the education version with attitude.<\/p>\n

Wikieducator<\/a> is free and open teaching resources such as lesson plans and digital content to support them, initially created by committed teachers. Everything is freely available for any teacher to download and use. But it doesn\u2019t stop there. Teachers can modify, adapt and re-purpose this material for their own use, on the understanding that they store the modified work back at WikiEducator.<\/p>\n

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So a teacher in Tuvalu can take material developed by the best teachers around the world, adapt it for their curriculum and language and then make it available for other teachers in Tuvalu, or Tokelau, or Timbuktu to use.<\/p>\n

Or better still, a teacher in Tuvalu can make a lesson plan about climate change and how it will affect their lives and teachers in Copenhagen can use that lesson with their own students. All they need is a browser and a connection to the Internet. And, if they have OLPC, the lesson plans can be stored locally on the School Server, minimizing the cost of the Internet.<\/p>\n

Countries can start their own project; so for example, there is a WikiEducator project in New Zealand. Their goal is to foster the collaborative development of a sustainable Open Education Resource<\/a> (OER) ecosystem for New Zealand teachers to create, share, repurpose and reuse digital content in support of the national curriculum. This is a project developed by teachers for teachers.<\/p>\n

All this is supported by the global WikiEducator project, which has the goal of creating a free version of the education curriculum by 2015. <\/p>\n

They will do that by:<\/p>\n