I was working with a set of students who are joining our school a bit later than the other students so they have their own cohort. Being an online teacher, the students live all over our state, the country, and I even have a few around the world. The students are in world history and were looking at the Columbian Exchange. My icebreaker question asked students what someone from a different state or country would most want from their home state. So a student from Arizona would pick out something from there that the rest of the world might want to get their hands on.
The next step was me dashing their hopes as I pointed out that not everything from one state might work the same in a different state due to various reasons such as the climate of the region. We looked at how farming spread around the world using a map from Threshold 7 of OER. The map indicated that it was much easier for crops to spread across Eurasia than the Americas. It took my students a bit of time, but they ultimately came to the conclusion that spreading across the same relative climate (Eurasia) would be easier than spreading across the Americas which stretch north to south and feature widely varying climates.
So thankful for this curriculum which I use parts of to supplement. Still hoping someday to teach at a school that uses OER as the curriculum.
