Digital Futures in Teacher Education: Open educational resources

and quality of teachingProject Lead: Richard Pountney, Faculty of Development and Society

Principal Investigator: Guy Merchant, Faculty of Development and Society

Digital literacy: issues and concerns http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-

yaFmQNk

Overview of the DeFT: Digital Futures in Teacher Education project Part of a larger UK Open Educational

Resources (OER) programme, led jointly by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the Higher Education Academy on behalf of HEFCE.   

Builds on previous involvement of the team with the OER programme

Links with Collaboration Sheffield, the Transformative Change project involving both Sheffield universities

Key goal is to raise the status and quality of teaching and the level of digital literacies and the (re)use of OERs in the teaching workforce.

Project partners Sheffield Hallam

University (Lead institution)

University of Sheffield 4 PGCE tutors at SHU

and TUOS Initial Teacher

Education students at SHU and TUOS - PGCE/BA in Education

8 primary and secondary schools

Local creative/digital industry partners:

Learning Connections SmartAssess Sheffield Children's

Festival Yorkshire and Humber

Grid for Learning UK Literacy

Association

Key terms: Open Educational Resources

… digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research (OECD, 2007).

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… teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. (Atkins et al. 2007).

Key terms: Digital literacy A blend of ICT, media and information skills and

knowledge situated within academic practice contexts while influenced by a wide range of techno-social practices involving communication, collaboration and participation in networks.

The project embraces a holistic view of digital literacy and engages with a number of different actors involved in/ influenced by issues related to teacher education

The project works on the assumption that increasingly the skills and experience that learners (and their teachers) have or need is changing and the baseline is being raised.

Digital literacies: ‘stages of development'

Project outputs: Open textbook i) Digital literacies in the context

of professional development: opportunities and challenges of embedding digital literacies within teacher education

ii) Digital literacies for creative learners: a set of tools and resources for embedding OERs within the school sector.

These materials will be accompanied by pedagogical descriptions with the aim to become incorporated into existing PGCE/PGCert modules

Key relationships

Case studies/stories of OER (re)use Partners’ reflections on

the process: before, during, after – examination of assumptions, challenges involved in “opening up” the materials

Focused around one module - but reflect across the scope of the project

Supporting materials

Evaluating the Practice of Opening up Resources for Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences www.c-sap.bham.ac.uk/oer

Key issues: quality in teaching with OERs Focus on the “why” rather than the “how”

of Open Educational Resources Emphasis on the broader cultural and

institutional context in which OERs are created and (re)used and any resulting issues and/or tensions 

Release of OERs at an institutional level provides an opportunity for existing quality measures (technical/pedagogical) to be reconsidered/evaluated

For more information: This presentation can be accessed from our

slideshare account at: http://slidesha.re/faculty_forum

Project blog: http://deftoer3.wordpress.com/ Follow us on Twitter @deftoer3

Contact details: Project manager: Anna Gruszczynska

a.gruszczynska@shu.ac.uk ext. 6384 Project assistant: Nicky Watts n.watts@shu.ac.uk