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OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.

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Open Author helps you build and publish Open Educational Resources for you and for the benefit of educators and learners everywhere.

Learn more about creating OER

Groups provides a flexible environment to organize, create, share, and discuss resources with others in your network. Collaborate with group members, tag and add resources to shared folders, create your own collections, all within a public or private group.

Groups

Search through collections curated by our digital librarians

Collections

Common Core resources organized for your needs

Common Core

Hubs

A Custom Resource Center

Projects, districts, states, and initiatives make use of Hubs to bring groups of educators together to create, organize, and share OER collections that meet their common goals. Explore Hubs

Microsites

Custom Digital Libraries

Microsites are custom, flexible sites that include all the features available on OER Commons. Microsites allow your users to search resource collections using a custom taxonomy at a unique URL. Contact Us

Our award-winning OER Professional Learning programs support instructors and curriculum specialists to gain the necessary skills required to find, adapt, and evaluate high quality open materials.

In-person and virtual OER workshops help focus instructors to develop a "commons" mindset, to experience the benefits of open processes using the platform's tools, collaborative features, and workflows. This can include using Open Author for creating, remixing, and publishing shared curriculum.

Learn More

How to Search OER Commons

View all How-to videos

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OER Commons is a dynamic digital library and network. Explore open education resources and join our network of educators dedicated to curriculum improvement.

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This overview was produced by OER Commons as an introduction to the use of OER in the K-12 ecosystem, including a brief overview of best practices.

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Brief, video introduction to OER

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The Council of Chief State School Officers

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WHY OER MATTERS: OER (Open Educational Resources) Introduction II

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WHY OER MATTERS: OER (Open Educational Resources) Introduction II

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This video was created by Brendan Walsh (New Jersey) for a 2012 video competition (http://whyopenedmatters.org/index.html) to explain why OER Matters.

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OER (Open Educational Resources) Introduction II

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When you take a photo, make music or shoot a video it’s yours, you own it. You also own the copyright. Which means you decide how it is used and who can use it and if it can be copied and shared (or remixed). Creative Commons is a set of licenses that enable lawful collaboration to do things like copy, share and remix. Creative Commons is a way to give permission to everyone to freely reuse your creative works. Hundreds of sites use these licenses: Wikipedia, YouTube, Archive.org, Vimeo, Soundcloud, Flickr, Bandcamp, Boundless, Jamendo, TED, Musopen, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Free Music Archive, Freesound.

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Arts & Culture Resources Film Music Photography

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Arts & Culture Resources Film Music Photography

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Film

Music

Photography

deviantART is an online community dedicated to showcasing art as prints, videos and literature. CC license options are built into deviantArt's UI, allowing users to set the permissions they want their works to carry. Naturally, different users choose different options for their works, including All Rights Reserved.

Fotopedia is a breathtaking application for the iPhone and iPad. The app builds on the concept of a coffee table book, updating and enhancing the browsing experience for the web. This project is possible thanks to Creative Commons, as over 18,000 of the pictures in Fotopedia Heritage book are under one of the CC licenses. The pictures come from all around the world; as individual photographers and organizations license their high quality photos under Creative Commons, the book will only grow as a community contributed and shareable resource.

'Click and Flick' is a National Library of Australia (NLA) initiative to open their online pictorial gateway, PictureAustralia, to contributions from the Australian public. PictureAustralia encourages people to make their material available on the archive under the CC licenses, as part of two dedicated Flickr image pools.

A comprehensive online guide to Slovene culture, Culture.si covers contemporary art, culture, and heritage in Slovenia. Over 2,300 articles in English and the fastest growing independent free image bank (currently over 1,500 images) are offered for reuse under Creative Commons licenses.

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Arts & Culture Resources - Creative Commons

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Film Music Photography DeviantART deviantART is an online community dedicated to showcasing art as prints, videos and literature. CC license options are built into deviantArt's UI, allowing users to set the permissions they want their works to carry. Naturally, different users choose different options for their works, including All Rights Reserved.

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a collection of 65,758,929 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute AUDIO, VIDEO and IMAGES

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From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository

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FINDING and USING CREATIVE COMMONS VIDEO on YouTube

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FINDING and USING CREATIVE COMMONS VIDEO on YouTube

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How To FIND And USE Creative Commons Videos On YouTube (without copyright claims)

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Several sites offer music published under Creative Commons’ flexible copyright licenses.

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Legal Music For Videos - Creative Commons

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Many musicians choose to release their songs under Creative Commons licenses, which give you the legal right to do things like use their music in your videos. What is Creative Commons? Creative Commons is a system that allows you to legally use “some rights reserved” music, movies, images, and other content — all for free.…

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NHPBS and PBS have curated FREE, standards-aligned videos, interactives, lesson plans, and more for teachers like you.

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PBS LearningMedia | Teaching Resources For Students And Teachers

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Inspire your students with thousands of free teaching resources including videos, lesson plans, and games aligned to state and national standards.

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COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO FINDING, EVALUATING AND USING OER

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COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO FINDING, EVALUATING AND USING OER

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State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA)

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OER are teaching and learning materials that are free and may be used, reused, mixed, and otherwise customized to meet specific needs. Free materials available for students, teachers, schools or districts which are not openly licensed do not have the same level of permitted uses such as adaptation, retention, or wide scale distribution.

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Discover K-12 OER to meet your remote teaching and learning needs.

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Discover K-12 OER to meet your remote teaching and learning needs

ISKME's digital librarians have curated collections of kindergarten through high school resources and full courses to help leverage OER for your students. Whether you are looking for resources your students can complete at home, or dynamic content to inspire your own teaching and learning practice, this hub, organized by grade level, subject, and provider will help you discover the resources you need at your fingertips. Explore the grade level, subject, and provider collections below. Once you click on a collection, you can refine the collections by selecting different fields, such as material types, on the left side of the page, under Filter Resources. If you are interested in accessing OER Commons from your LMS via an LTI integration. Please fill out and submit the form here.

Get started using our OER authoring tool, Open Author. This video walks you through how to author and remix; including how to add and format content, import and attach resources, embed media, add co-Created by ISKME. Licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. authors, check for accessibility, describe your resource, select a license, align to standards, publish, and download.

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Discover K-12 OER to meet your remote teaching and learning needs ISKME's digital librarians have curated collections of kindergarten through high school resources and full courses to help leverage OER for your students.

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The Khan Academy has a large library of videos covering math, biology, chemistry, physics and even the humanities, finance and history. Khan videos aren’t so much recorded lectures as short 10 minute long tutorials with an instructor narrating explanations and working things out on a board by hand on your computer screen. Check out Khan’s library of videos.

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A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.

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CK-12 offers free high-quality, standards-aligned, open content in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) subjects. By providing these free resources, CK-12 is working toward educational equity for all. CK-12 provides an integrated set of tools for learning including digital textbooks, concept-based learning, SAT prep, and interactive Algebra curriculum (with additional math and science subjects in progress). CK-12 resources are openly licensed using Creative Commons.

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Sponsored by the New York State Education Department, contains OER curriculum modules K-12

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The New York State Education Department discontinued support for the EngageNY.org website on July 7, 2022. The NYSED encourages educators to download any EngageNY content they wish to use in the future from our archive sites below.

All ELA and mathematics curriculum files will be available at the links below, and will remain free and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

Archived EngageNY Curriculum Files:

Grades 3-8 ELA and Mathematics Test Materials:
Questions regarding this change may be directed to the EngageNY Help Desk.

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The New York State Education Department discontinued support for the EngageNY.org website on July 7, 2022. The NYSED encourages educators to download any EngageNY content they wish to use in the future from our archive sites below.

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4th Grade SEEd textbook for the 2020-2021 school year. This textbook was developed to align to the Utah Science with Engineering Education (SEEd) Standards. (Added: March 17, 2020)

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5th Grade SEEd textbook for the 2020-2021 school year. This textbook was developed to align to the Utah Science with Engineering Education (SEEd) Standards. (Added: March 17, 2020)

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6th Grade SEEd textbook for the 2020-2021 school year. This textbook was developed to align to the Utah Science with Engineering Education (SEEd) Standards. (Added: March 17, 2020)

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7th Grade SEEd textbook for the 2020-2021 school year. This textbook was developed to align to the Utah Science with Engineering Education (SEEd) Standards. (Added: March 17, 2020)

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8th Grade SEEd textbook for the 2020-2021 school year. This textbook was developed to align to the Utah Science with Engineering Education (SEEd) Standards. (Added: March 17, 2020)

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6th Grade Math Workbook and Support Materials

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6th Grade Math Workbook and Support Materials

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A University of Utah Partnership Project for 7th and 8th Grade Math

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A University of Utah Partnership Project for 7th and 8th Grade Math

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A University of Utah Partnership Project for 7th and 8th Grade Math

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These Open Texts provide access to grade-leveled and grade-appropriate readings and learning tasks to support the Core by providing a wide range of informational and literary non-fiction texts. These texts have been assessed by teacher teams for text complexity by using both quantitative lexile level and qualitative criteria.

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Grade Band 6-8: Using Informational Texts - Section One

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Section One: Text Selections based on Text Complexity

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Teach effectively by creating your own interactive learning experiences-or adopt exemplars made by teachers and Smithsonian experts.

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Smithsonian

Learning Lab

Discover the digital education platform that connects people to Smithsonian objects, resources, and stories.

Collections by Grade

Explore some of our most popular Learning Lab Collections. Use them as a springboard to continue your exploration of the many collections available on the site.

Talk with Me!
Learn about your community and neighborhood. In this Toolkit, leaners explore different homes, shops, and people in your neighborhood and have fun with related activities.

Talk with Me Toolkits provide you with chances to talk with your children to improve thinking, vocabulary, and language development. Talking with your child is great-and research shows that the quality of words children hear matters more than how much you talk.

Talk with Me Toolkits give you ideas to begin conversations that are organized around a theme. The Toolkits feature videos, photographs, paintings, and artworks along with questions to talk about with your child. At the end of each toolkit there are more activities to do and books to read together. Go through this toolkit with your child and see how many topics there are to talk about!
This toolkit was adapted with a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Links to third-party websites and videos are included in this Toolkit for informational purposes only. They do not indicate the Smithsonian's endorsement, sponsorship of, or affiliation with the third party or content of the linked site, including any advertisements that might be posted.

Learn More

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

What inspires you? Get to know Alma Thomas, (b. Columbus, Georgia; lived and worked in Washington, DC, 1891-1978), an American artist and educator known for her signature painting style using bright colors and patterns inspired by nature. She became a full-time artist late in her life. Born in a time of horses and buggies, she lived through big advancements in technology, such as the space race and moon landing. Her art was inspired by the nature she saw outside her home studio, and awe for the exploration of our vast universe.
Get To Know Alma Thomas Use it in the classroom to teach:
is part of the Hirshhorn KIDS About the Artist series. About the Artist biographies are designed for kids under age 12. Modern and contemporary artists' lives reflect recent human history and events. Sharing these life stories and artworks can help kids see their own potential and better understand the world and their place in it. It is our goal to inspire future generations of artists, makers, and creative problem solvers-sharing artists stories is one way Hirshhorn KIDS realize this goal.
Art classroom: Color Theory, Pattern

Language Arts classroom: Biography

Social Studies classroom: 20th century

Learn More

National Museum of American History

In this playlist you will learn about how three of the first presidents shaped the executive branch of the United States government.

Start by clicking on the first tile in the upper left hand corner. Then move through the playlist by clicking on the ">" symbol at the bottom of the page. Look for the information and paperclip icons to provide more information about selected resources. There are 34 tiles in this collection.

Learn More

Educator Programs

Cultivating Learning is a professional development series where Smithsonian educators model teaching techniques for using digital museum resources to support student learning. This year's series celebrates America at 250. Programs are free and accessible to anyone.

Wednesday, April 15, 4:00 PM EST

Join Phoebe Sherman of the National Postal Museum to explore how postage stamps can be used in the classroom to encourage civic awareness and engagement. We'll examine how stamps can spark curiosity and deepen understanding of civics, American history, national identity, and commemoration by using thinking routines that focus on both subject matter and artistic design. You'll see how these approaches come to life with students and leave with classroom-ready resources and fresh ideas for incorporating postage stamps into your teaching practice.

Watch

Wednesday, May 20, 4:00 PM EST

Join Nyssa Buning of the National Museum of American History's Spark!Lab and Carol O'Donnell of the Smithsonian Science Education Center to explore strategies for cultivating an inventive mindset in your students. We'll discuss the history of STEAM innovation in America and try an open-ended invention challenge that uses object-based learning techniques to encourage creative problem solving and support curiosity and perseverance, skills essential to inventors throughout history. You'll leave with a set of facilitation tools to support students as they develop their own inventive identity and become future problem-solvers. You'll also receive access to a newly released e-book from the Smithsonian Science Education Center, STEAM Innovation: Celebrating Our Nation's 250 Years.

Register

Wednesday, June 17, 4:00 PM EST

As America turns 250 in 2026, young people are writing its next chapter. Join a group of educators who apply interdisciplinary approaches to learning to engage young people in civic dialogue tied to their communities.

Register

What will you find in the Smithsonian Learning Lab?

Resources

Millions of Smithsonian digital images, recordings, texts, and videos in history, art and culture, and the sciences

Collections

Thousands of examples of resources organized and structured for teaching and learning by educators and subject experts

Resources

Millions of Smithsonian digital images, recordings, texts, and videos in history, art and culture, and the sciences

Collections

Thousands of examples of resources organized and structured for teaching and learning by educators and subject experts

Browse individual resources by type

Browse model collections on different topics

Tips

Tips

Create collections of resources to engage learners, or freely adapt ones already made by Learning Lab users like you.

Use Learning Lab tools to customize and enhance your collections.

Browse ready-to-use model collections by educational use

Browse ready-to-use model collections by learning strategy or theme

Tips

Tips

Subscribe to our Bright Ideas newsletter

To learn more about the Smithsonian Learning Lab and to read about strategies, approaches, new features, and more, subscribe to the Bright Ideas newsletter. We'll be sending out a new issue every few weeks.

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Smithsonian Learning Lab: Discover, Create, Share

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Smithsonian Learning Lab Discover the digital education platform that connects people to Smithsonian objects, resources, and stories. Explore some of our most popular Learning Lab Collections. Use them as a springboard to continue your exploration of the many collections available on the site. Talk with Me! Learn about your community and neighborhood.