Are you looking for a worksheet for Spanish 11 verb conjugation or a multi-media clip for Social Studies on the History of Money? Do you need to assess your Grade 5 students’ grasp of fractions and decimals? Have you created the perfect classroom activity on brainstorming and are anxious to share it with colleagues?

Imagine a place where you can access and share learning resources. Picture a province-wide community of BC teachers who create, update, review and improve resources for all members to share. Now you can stop imagining and start participating.

The Educators’ Resource Centre (ERC) encourages the sharing of learning resources for Kindergarten to Grade 12 among BC teachers. As an online service, the ERC provides teachers with the ability to search, download for use, and contribute a variety of learning resources. Teachers are also encouraged to provide feedback and suggestions for use of the resources they access.

The ERC has recently been upgraded! Version 3.0 includes an updated menu system, improved features and better organization. It is easier and faster for educators to sign up for a free account, using the request form available on the ERC website. Users who already have an ERC account will be able to use the same account information to log into version 3.0.

The ERC home page now presents eight Featured Learning Objects, and will be updated once or twice a year to highlight other popular resources. The new Learning Outcome search function is an initiative by the Ministry of Education and allows users to search for resources by learning outcome. When contributing, users will be able to choose from a list of 4000 prescribed learning outcomes to attach to their resource to enable the Learning Outcome search function.

This year the ERC will be integrated with Open School BC’s learning management system Blackboard (WebCT). As well as giving Online Consortium members complete access to the ERC they will be able to make use of the activity planner in the ERC to create or customize modules within Blackboard. The consolidation of these two great Open School BC services gives online educators more flexibility, versatility and capacity in e-learning.

Open School BC has been working to make the ERC the complete online resource site for British Columbia’s K-12 teachers. We are continuously adding material from national and provincial organizations. Some of the organizations that have made interesting, useful and entertaining resource contributions include:

Royal BC Museum and BC Archives | Library and Archives Canada | Provincial Capital Commission | COOL School | Parks Canada | Statistics Canada | BC Transplant Society | Environment Canada | Natural Resources Canada | BC Hydro | BC Dairy Foundation | Parliament of Canada | Canadian Museum of Nature | Historica | Provincial Emergency Program

Open School BC thanks these organizations for their contributions and continues discussions with many other organizations to bring even more knowledge, resources and value to the ERC.