Some of you already will probably have heard about our Open Educational Resource programme ‘The Virtual School‘ before. Today we thought: let’s write an open letter to all Pedagoo members who haven’t. This is just one page, but you might prefer a video to reading a document:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/YM5wju2bfD4[/youtube]
Maybe this is already enough to make you want to give it a go and participate.
Get in touch by sending us an email: vsteam@fusion-universal.com
For those of you who want to know more:
Why are so few teachers in the UK doing something like Khan Academy?
Many teachers in the UK have been looking across the big lake at what the guys at Khan Academy are doing. We have met many teachers in the UK who think they can do an equally good or even better job in explaining the easy and difficult concepts of the secondary curriculum in the sciences or in Maths. Many of them are saying: why not do it through videos, if that means that they can reach thousands or sometimes even hundreds of thousands of learners – now that’s one really big classroom!
But how can you manage to make videos in your spare time?
Nowadays, any teacher can record her or his voice (and therefore a lesson) – because recording devices are all around us: pcs, macs, ipads, phones – the list continues. But making a video based on an audio lesson takes time and animation skills – and only few teachers in the UK have both.
No doubt: At ‘the Virtual School’, we want to co-create resources with those select few 21st century prototype teachers. But we want more: we want to give all motivated Science and Maths teacher who haven’t got this visualisation ability the same opportunity to get their lesson to the hundreds of thousands of learners out there waiting for good teaching to come their way.
Our creative design team picks up the 2-3 min audio lesson, and turns it into an engaging video. Let’s say for instance for the topic “What are Quarks?”:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/nlv06lSAC7c[/youtube]
Anybody, including the contributing teacher, can pick this video resource up for free and integrate it in a blended learning model with their own students.
Our background:
The Virtual School is the social responsibility programme of our educational technology startup Fusion Universal. Our social programme is funded by our work in the corporate space, in which we have created a successful social learning platform called Fuse. This cloud platform and our video production facilities are being used by our corporate clients. Our idea: now that we have all this expertise and technology, why not also use it for a purely social project and make a real difference? That’s why we not only distribute the co-created Virtual School videos absolutely free of charge under a Creative Commons License (contributing teachers are of course accredited) but also make sure they are translated and available to learners in developing countries.
To do all that we need your help – at the heart of our project is your brain – and your teaching.
To be honest: months have past since we first stumbled upon Pedagoo – how one get’s carried away by the day to day… Mind you, maybe the wait has been for the better: since then we have learned many lessons and have honed our collaboration with teachers to make it really easy for you to contribute. Teaching thousands of learners really is just a couple of mouse clicks and a little audio recording away – and all that in a topic of your choice that you feel really passionate about.
You can view our videos co-created with UK teachers to date under: http://www.youtube.com/virtualschool
And of course, we are also available on Twitter: https://twitter.com/virtualschooluk
It would be great to discuss in the comment section what you think about our programme.