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General resources

Science education is about more than physics, chemistry and mathematics... It's about learning to think and to solve problems, which are valuable skills that can be applied through all spheres of life. Teaching these skills to our next generation is crucial in the current global environment where methodologies, technology and tools are rapidly evolving. Education should benefit from these fast moving developments. In our simplified model there are three layers to how technology can significantly influence your teaching and teaching environment.

First layer: educator collaboration

There are many tools that help educators collaborate more effectively. We know that communities of practice are powerful tools for the refinement of methodology, content and knowledge as well as superb for providing support to educators. One of the challenges facing community formation is the time and space to have sufficient meetings to build real communities and exchanging practices, content and learnings effectively. Technology allows us to streamline this very effectively by transcending space and time. It is now possible to collaborate over large distances (transcending space) and when it is most appropriate for each individual (transcending time) by working virtually (email, mobile, online etc.).

Our textbooks have been uploaded in their entirety to the Connexions website ( (External Link) ), making them easily accessible and adaptable, as they are under an open licence, stored in an open format, based on an open standard, on an open-source platform, for free, where everyone can produce their own books. Our textbooks are released under an open copyright license - CC-BY. This Creative Commons By Attribution Licence allows others to legally distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon our work, even commercially, as long as they credit us for the original creation. With them being available on the Connexions website and due to the open copyright licence, learners and educators are able to download, copy, share and distribute our books legally at no cost. It also gives educators the freedom to edit, adapt, translate and contextualise them, to better suit their teaching needs.

Connexions is a tool where individuals can share, but more importantly communities can form around the collaborative, online development of resources. Your community of educators can therefore:

• form an online workgroup around the textbook;
• make your own copy of the textbook;
• edit sections of your own copy;
• add your own content into the book or replace existing content with your content;
• use other content that has been shared on the platform in your own book;
• create your own notes / textbook / course material as a community.

Educators often want to share assessment items as this helps reduce workload, increase variety and improve quality. Currently all the solutions to the exercises contained in the textbooks have been uploaded onto our free and open online assessment bank called FullMarks ( (External Link) ), with each exercise having a shortcode link to its solution on FullMarks. To access the solution simply go to (External Link) , enter the shortcode, and you will be redirected to the solution on FullMarks.