TE year2sourcebook/year2 unit1 Introduction to the Unit

Curricular resource creation by teachers has been seen as an important process of teacher professional development (TPD). During the first year of the program, the paper course covered creation of “generic” (non subject-specific) resources. In the second year, the focus is on middle school subject teaching, the course will meet the requirement of developing curricular resources that are specific to each subject, using relevant subject specific software applications.

Free and Open Source digital tools are available for creating educational resources in most school subjects, including the 'subjects' whose pedagogies are covered in the second year of the D.El.Ed. course, Mathematics, Science, Social science, Language, Art, Music etc.

There are some significant advantages that are usually available in creating such resources, due to their digital nature. The resource can be saved and shared with others. The resource can be edited using the same software by the author and others, to further revise and refine it. The resource can be retained for posterity in your PDL and retrieved whenever required.

Given that the spirit of teaching-learning is to share of ones' own learning, thoughts and experiences, it is important that the resources created are also possible to be re-used and revised by others. Hence any resource created must carry a copyright which allows for such re-use and revision. The Creative Commons (CC) licenses are usually used by the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement and this has been discussed in unit 1 of year 1.

In this unit, the student teacher will learn to create resources for their subjects, (including modifying/revising resources created by others) and share with their classmates, under a CC copyright.

This unit also discusses the far reaching socio-cultural, political and economic implications, both positive and negative that ICTs are having on our society.