Welcome to OER in the K-12 Classroom!

I'm excited about this course and hope you all are too. I know we'll all learn a lot from each other.

Getting to know P2PU

Here are a few important things to know about P2PU. It's really all about:

• Community and peer learning - This means we are all learners and teachers, so jump in and collaborate, add to the class, edit posts to make them better, help teach, share, etc.
• Openness - All content on P2PU (including your contributions) is open licensed. This means we are all giving others permission to share our work here as long as they attribute us as the source (CC BY). This is great, because it means these courses can be remixed and reused by others. Share the love!
• Personalization - This is one of the things that makes the School of Ed different from ohter professional development you might have been involved in. This course is about your learning so take control of it and make it work for you. If you don't find an activity here to be beneficial to you, suggest another one. Personalize, customize, and make your learning the very best it can be!
   

And here are a few techical tips to get you started.

• P2PU is pretty straightforward, but ask any questions you have. (A good way to do this is either as a comment on a task or on the general Activity Wall, which is general to the course.
• You will get notifications by email of various comments and important things going on this the course. If it gets to be too much, just go to My P2PU -> Edit Profile -> Notifications and choose which ones to turn off.
• Most tasks on P2PU can be edited by participants. If you see something that is wrong or have something important to add, just click the Edit button in the upper right. Don't worry about messing things up because there is version control so anything can be "undone." :) If you have something to add but aren't sure about editing the task, you can also say it in a comment.
• We'll use tools on the P2PU site in this course as well as others. Don't feel constrained to the tools we use though. If you have a favorite tool or Web 2.0 site that meets your needs, please use it and invite others to do the same.
   

Getting to know each other

As we're starting on this course, please do two things to help us get to know each other. First, if you haven't already, update your profile (My P2PU -> Edit Profile) to include info about yourself and a picture. Also, post a comment on this task to introduce yourself (Post Comment in upper-right corner). In addition to your name, what grade and subject you teach, and anything else you want to  share, include your own goals for this course and collaboration ideas you have. (See below.)

Setting your own path for this course

This course is all about steering your own learning in a way that works for you.

As we're getting started, take a look at the syllabus. Think about how you can customize each week's activities to meet your own goals. In particularm weejs 3-6 have a lot of opportunities for this.

In your introductory post, include how you plan to customize the course to meet your own goals.

Possible collaborations

Collaborting is a big part of peer learning, and one way to do this is through active collaborations on tasks. The sky's the limit on what you might do for this course but here are some ideas:

• Join up with someone in a similar grade level our subject and find and evaluate resources together for Week 3.
• Form a collaborative team with a group to do a more ambitious remix project.
• Exchange OERs with someone to remix.
• Exchange materials you've already developed with someone and remix them to be completely open.
• Create new OERs as a part of a team.

Use this Google spreadsheet to record your ideas or interest in being a part of a collaborative effort and/or write about it in your introductory post.

Hopefully, this will be longest chunk of text from me you'll have to read in this course. :)