Open Tapestry is an excellent search engine which brings together open licensed educational resources from all over the Web. It has advanced search options with which you can choose your content from numerous subjects. It also has social networking features as well as tools to create and manage online content. Let’s learn how to get started with Open Tapestry.
For effective usage of Open Tapestry features, you need to register to set up an account with it. Sign up directly or sign in with your Facebook, Twitter or Google account.
Weave button:
As Open Tapestry’s features are quite similar to Pinterest, it provides you with “Weave” button that helps you clip content (e.g. Videos, images, text). Hit “Ctrl+Shift+B” to display your Bookmarks, drag the “Weave” button to your Bookmarks bar. Use the weave button to clip content if you find anything interesting while you’re browsing. When you clip content, it records the Creative Commons license and also a link to the source.
Once you’ve logged in to your account and installed the Weave button, everything is set for you to access, create and manage open licensed educational contents. Enter your inquiries in the Search Bar and it will automatically display numerous open licensed educational resources. You can filter your search by using advanced search options.
Everything: By clicking on “Everything”, you are able to see all posts related to your search results. You can see the details, re-clip, like and comment on the content you find interesting and you can also follow the person who has shared it.
Courses: Here, you can access numerous higher education courses namely Art History, Biology, Business, Chemistry, Communications, Computer Science, Economics, Literature, General Education, History, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Philosophy, Political Science, Professional Development and Psychology. Courses are based on open licensed courses from The Saylor Foundation and other organizations.
Each course has many sub topics that include copy, embed and follow the options. You can add them to your tasks and also share it with others in the form of tweets, Facebook posts or through e-mailing.
My Tapestries:
Here, you can create a Tapestry by entering a name and description, selecting a category, “learning resource type” and some curating tools and uploading your content file. This option includes clips and re-clips you’ve shared.
Following: This includes the people, courses or the topics you follow.
The above mentioned are the options to discover, create, share and manage educational contents with Open Tapestry. Let’s go through a short review of the features of Open Tapestry.
Features of Open Tapestry:
Discovery: Search the Open Tapestry index and other sources for open licensed online learning resources.
Google Docs: Open Tapestry allows you to insert Google documents, spreadsheets and presentations directly into pages in read-only or editable form.
Social: Open Tapestry enables social media features where you can follow people and tapestries, like, clip, re-clip, share and comment on useful tapestries.
Page Builder: It helps users build web pages by turning clippings into templates.
Curate Content: It allows users to place clippings into tapestries and arrange them in a sequence.
In addition to the above mentioned features which are free, the Premium version of Open Tapestry offers many more features.
We hope this information is useful for you to know about Open Tapestry that helps users not only in searching open educational content but also in creating, sharing and managing it. We’d like to know few more tools like this. If you know a few, please feel free to share with us in the comment box.
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