This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Education Blog articles.
Today we are announcing the general availability of the Open Up Resources curricula and Microsoft Education free offering for Back to School 2018. Open Up Resources is a nonprofit working to develop the highest quality full-course OER curricula, standards-aligned, and provided for free to promote instructional equity. This curriculum was developed by Illustrative Mathematics, and currently covers 6th – 8th Grade Math. Recently, EdReports rated this curriculum with their highest ever rating.
Any teacher can now easily sign up to use the Open Up Resources curriculum. With today’s announcement, Microsoft Education is offering this curriculum through OneNote , Forms and custom dashboards. This solution is free and can be used by teachers and students on any platform and device.
Microsoft Education - Content, Assessments and Dashboards
The Office 365 Education solution takes the Open Up Resources curriculum and assessments and puts together a free solution that pulls together content, assessments and analytics.
- Content: Organize all your class materials, including Open Up Resources, into one digital notebook with OneNote Class Notebooks. Then, create more compelling, interactive content that you can easily collaborate on with students and colleagues.
- Assessments: Quickly create basic surveys, quizzes, questionnaires, registrations and more with Microsoft Forms. Teachers can view results in dashboards as they are submitted, and data can be easily exported to Excel for grading or be viewed in dashboards.
- Dashboards: Monitor and analyze a broad range of live data from content engagement through easy-to-use dashboards, interactive reports, and compelling data visualizations with custom Dashboards provided by Microsoft Education.
To get a sense of the solution, we put together a video for the original pilot demonstrating the overall concept
Classroom-Friendly Materials Access with OneNote Class Notebooks
Using the custom OneNote Class Notebook to access and deliver the Open Up Resources curriculum:
- Teachers can distribute the Open Up Resources 6–8 Math materials on any device via OneNote.
- Students can write, draw, collaborate and save their work automatically in a personal digital notebook.
- Real-time collaboration can occur around the materials: teacher-to-class, teacher-to-student, and student-to-student.
- OneNote Class Notebooks integrate seamlessly with common LMS and SIS platforms.
Open Up Resources 6th grade curriculum selected in the custom OneNote Class Noteobok app
Last spring, both Buncombe County and Evergreen school districts engaged in a private pilot using the Open Up Resources materials in a OneNote Class Notebook. Here is what Stephanie Buckner, District Tech Coordinator from Buncombe County had to say:
“The integration of the Open Up Mathematics resources into OneNote has allowed teachers in our district to truly integrate our one-to-one devices and mathematics in a powerful way to advance student learning. Utilizing OneNote and Illustrative Math together in the classroom has opened up a gateway to each student’s thoughts and ideas throughout the units. The collaboration of materials between OneNote and Open Up has actually increased the practice of mathematical discourse simultaneously with our digital initiative.”
Assessment Tools with Immediate Insight with Microsoft Forms
Open Up Resources assessments have been integrated with Microsoft Forms. When a Class Notebook is created, the Forms are all automatically pre-installed into the Educators Forms library in Office 365 Education, ready to be distributed as assessments. Through assessments, delivered in Forms, benefits include:
- Easy digital assessments
- One-click assignment and efficient scoring
- Support for differentiation through rapid, formative assessment insight.
Open Up Resources assessments delivered in Microsoft Forms
Dashboards:
For the pilot program, Microsoft Education has created custom dashboards that are tied to the Open Up Resources Class Notebooks and Forms data. These dashboards will allow teachers to gain insights into the assessment data and trends.
Get Started today!
To help teachers and schools get up and running, we have put together Getting Started materials on the Microsoft Support site which includes instructions and support information..
If you or your district would like to begin using the new offering,
- Go to the Open Up Resources site and sign up
- Login to the site
- Click on the OneNote link in the upper right of the website navigation bar.
- Request materials and check the box for “piloting Microsoft OneNote”
Microsoft Education @MicrosoftEDU
Microsoft OneNote for Education @OneNoteEDU
Open Up Resources @OpenUpResources
Illustrative Mathematics @IllustrateMath