UpLEARN Resources
Unplugged Mom.com is happy to help families,parents and kids everywhere discover the audacity to unplug from compulsory and rejoin a natural humanity through community based learning both online and in your own geographic community. Through the UpLEARN project, Unplugged Mom has pulled together a list of resources where one can learn a variety of topics from a variety of teachers and sources. Feel free to browse through the following to find what may appeal to you and your desire to learn!
Ted Talk By Richard Baraniuk on Open Source Learning
Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.
Ted Talk By Salman Kahn: Let’s Use Videos to Reinvent Education
Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.
Lens on the Future: Open Source Learning By Anne H. Moore
This 2002 article expresses how the then emerging technologies would have the potential to enable individuals to construct their own learning environments. I found it very interesting to see that in the last nearly 10 years all the things mentioned have come to fruitation, but are being so erroneously underutlized.
Pathways to Prosperity – Meeting the challenge of preparing young americans for the 21st century -Report published by Harvard Graduate School of Education
This report published in Febuary of 2011 goes into great detail of why the single path track of education in America is failing a wide majority of adolescents and young adults. It also looks into the difference in approaches of other countries in comparison to the U.S. including a greater emphasis on vocational education versus textbook/classroom education.
Village Home Education Resource Center
Village Home is a dynamic, choice-based learning community creatively integrating family, education and real life to empower learners of all ages. The vision of Village Home is to be a community model for family centered, home-based education that inspires and supports self-directed, lifelong learning.
Global Village School
Global Village School provides students throughout the world with a high-quality education that promotes peace, understanding, and respect. It is an education that supports students in truly being themselves, encourages them to follow their dreams, and helps them to become wise and capable stewards of the planet and each other. We work to nurture and protect the passion and enthusiasm for creating a better world that comes so naturally to so many young people.
UnCollege
UnCollege is a social movement supporting self-directed higher education. Intrigued? Read the UnCollege manifesto, Your Guide to Academic Deviance.
Epals – Global Community Where Learners Connect
This is the world’s largest network of K-12classrooms, enabling students and teachers to safely connect and collaborate with classrooms in more than 200 countries and territories. Offered at no cost to classrooms, educators can access the community to find collaborative projects, join discussions in the community forums, and search thousands of classroom profiles to engage with others in authentic exchanges – all within a safe protected online environment.
Although this site was originally designed for traditional school systems, the organizers have made additiosns to their forums for Families – http://www.epals.com/forums/default.aspx?GroupID=54 and Homeschools – http://www.epals.com/forums/default.aspx?GroupID=54 and there are no guidelines as to which constitutes a “class” so therefore home educators have options as to which group they prefer to use.
TED – Ideas Worth Spreading
TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize.
This site has an incredible collection of videos that generally range in length from 5 to 20 minutes, on a wide variety of topics. TED talk subject areas include technology, entertainment, design, business, science, and global issues.
MIT Open Courseware
MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology - OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content and materials- lecture notes, exams, and videos – that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. In 1999, MIT Faculty considered how to use the Internet in pursuit of MIT’s mission—to advance knowledge and educate students—and in 2000 proposed OCW. MIT published the first proof-of-concept site in 2002, containing 50 courses. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines. Going forward, the OCW team is updating existing courses and adding new content and services to the site.
MIT Open Courseware - Highlights for High School
Highlights for High School features MIT OpenCourseWare materials that are most useful for high school students and teachers, such as MIT intro courses, exam prep courses and course specifically designed for high schoolers.
Khan Academy – A free world-class education for anyone anywhere.
The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We’re a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.All of the site’s resources are available to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy’s materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge. There are a vast variety of topics in categories such as math, science, humanities and finances.
P2PU – Peer 2 Peer Univeristy
Peer 2 Peer University is an open community that enables learning with and from each other. All P2PU courses are free and based on materials and resources openly available on the web. Anyone can volunteer to run a course. You don’t have to be an expert! At P2PU groups of peers come together to learn course materials collaboratively. Check our course list to see what’s running! This is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. P2PU – Learning for everyonem by everyone about almost anything.
Disclaimer: The content contained in any of the above sources do not necessarily reflect the thoughts and opinions of UnpluggedMom.com© and UnpluggedMomRadio© UnpluggedMom.com and Unplugged Mom Radio does not directly endorse any of the above or suggest it as the right course of action for any individual family. UnpluggedMom.com understands and appreciates the variety in style, needs and desires of each individual family and their needs and therefore cannot recommend any one source of learning over another. The above list of resources is intended to provide a current selection from which one can browse and choose what may work well to fit their individual family’s needs. UnpluggedMom.com and Unplugged Mom Radio is not responsible for any questionable content that may be found on any of the above websites or in any of the material acquired therein.
