WISELearn Digital Content Curation Training

Today I met with other educators from my area for a digital content curation training for WISELearn, a Wisconsin educator portal.  The educators were made up of different grade levels, content area, and positions in the districts of Dane, Green, Jefferson, Kenosha, Racine, Rock and Walworth counties in southern Wisconsin.

What is WISELearn?

WISELearn is a portal being developed by DPI that will provide all Wisconsin educators with a place in which to collaborate and learn and where they can find content for their teaching and their own development.

WISE Learn will provide a social networking platform to support professional learning communities and repositories of a broad variety of digital material related to educators’ teaching duties and professional learning objectives.  

Open Educational Resources, or OER, is one category of content that will live in WISE Learn. Our project involves beginning to build WISELearn’s OER collection.

Project Goal

Our collective goal is to build a high quality starter collection of teaching resources for WISE Learn. In particular, we interested in an OER collection

• That was curated by Wisconsin educators, who reviewed and offered guidance for using each item;
• That was vetted using criteria drawn from Achieve’s OER rubrics and EQuIP rubrics; and
• Whose items have been correlated to Hess’s cognitive rigor matrix.  

Ideally this portal will be released in the Fall of 2015.  Some of the curation has already been completed by a couple of CESAs (Cooperative Educational Services Agencies) already in Wisconsin.  The fact that many CESAs are collaborating on this brings a variety of grade levels and content area expertise to the table.

The term OER (open educational resource) can be defined as "a general term referring to teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use."  The open movement is partly making materials available and sharable with limited restrictions.  All resources will be free and available for everyone.

Copyright is a huge issue when curating information.  With each resource we checked their copyright status and the policies aligned with the webpage we found the resource on.  WISELearn will honor the rights of authors and creators.  Curators of resources will identify the license associated with the resource.

For more information, go to: Copyright for Teachers or About Creative Commons

I won't say that this is an easy process, but the end result is going to be very beneficial to educators.  The process forces me to really look deep at the content and analyze what is there, how its used, the opportunities for deeper learning or critical thinking, and how it aligns to the CCSS (Common Core State Standards).  Questions were assessed using a rubric for how well the resource is aligned to the intent of the ELA CCSSs and what is the quality of instructional support materials, assessments, subject matter explanation, and student engagement.

The day itself allowed for a lot of collaboration to take place.  I think this is very valuable in the curation and assessment process.  Multiple viewpoints allowed for insights that one may not have gained on their own.  I know I value feedback on things I write before finally punishing them just because I worry I am not using the right words or if I am missing an important piece as an oversight.  This makes this a better resource in my opinion.

Keep an eye out for this great resource to be available this fall!


*definitions and screenshots from DPI WISELearn documents and training information.