How CORE Fits in the Digital Learning Ecosystem

Yesterday, I wrote a blog post on the Innovation & Learning Technology (ILT) blog about approaching educational technologies as parts of a larger whole. I explained that, as educators and learners, we should feel in command of our edtech instead of the other way around. CORE is one of many players with specific role(s) within our digital learning ecosystem.

CORE is best at helping you do these things: 

• Use immediately. Search, access and use digital resources from multiple repositories like Discovery Education, CBC, and LearnAlberta from one location, instead of searching each one separately.
• Publish and share. Publish in a secure district-wide OR publicly accessible community. You can invite others to use and remix your items if you wish.
• Easily manage your resources. As the contributor, you can edit, archive, delete, and even change ownership of a resource at any time. Share the CORE URL for a resource in any online location, including your LMS (like D2L or Moodle), blog, or website.
• Share your thoughts. Use the comment and ratings features (similar to reviews on Amazon) to tell other users how a resource fits into learning and teaching in a particular context.

On the other hand, CORE is not great at helping you do these things:

• Sharing with a smaller group than your school district. In this case you may wish to use a Web 2.0 tool or LMS course shell (like D2L or Moodle).
• Collaborating in real-time. Contributing an item in CORE means that you are sharing it (whether in draft or final form) with others in the CORE community. If you want to collaborate in the same document in real time, you might consider Google Drive instead. However, you can always share your Google link in CORE like we have with our constantly-updated FAQs. 

Let's take our list of what CORE is best at one step further. Here's a generic example that illustrates the role that CORE could play in a group inquiry project. You can see how different pieces of technology can be used throughout the learning process, based on their features and functions. 

This example shows how:

a) Small group work can be organized and carried out using Google Apps
b) Research, publishing, sharing, and commenting can be done through CORE
c) Student reflections can be used throughout using Iris or other digital portfolio tool, and
d) Web and video resources can be shared, published and used as part of the learning process through CORE.

Here's a link to the original item in CORE in a form that you can modify, remix, reuse, and share. 

We'd love to hear your thoughts on how you use CORE and what it's best at in your learning context. Leave us a comment!

Stephanie
& the CORE team