Opening doors to open digital practice for educators: The Open Page project

This paper outlines an Open Educational Resource (OER) and Open Educational Practice (OEP) project aimed at encouraging educators to build digital and data literacies through collaborative development of critical “teacher-to-teacher open overviews” of edtech platforms. The project, titled The Open Page, features a ‘Tool Parade’ of short, captioned videos and podcasts overviewing digital classroom technologies through three critical lenses: classroom uses, data and privacy ethics, and differentiated learning. The OER feature both pre-service teachers and Education faculty. The videos form the backbone of PA Day professional development sessions for local school boards, led by the pre-service student Research Team. They also serve as the textbook for two Service Learning classes, in which students contribute podcasts and pedagogical resources to the OER collection and develop and lead professional learning sessions to showcase the site within local school communities.
Overall, the project is an immersive capacity-building experience that scaffolds project management competencies, data literacies, and hands-on practice with technical and creative production and open licencing, all as an active student-faculty collaboration embodying the ethics and practice of contributing to the open web.