Photodentro Learning Object Repository

 

Photodentro LOR is the Greek National Learning Object Repository (LOR) for primary and secondary education. It hosts learning objects, which are small, self-contained (semantically and functionally autonomous), reusable units of learning resources, tagged with educational metadata. It is open to everyone, students, teachers, parents, as well as anybody else interested.
Photodentro LOR has been designed and developed by CTI in the context of the “Digital School” large scale program of the Greek Ministry of Education (2010-2015) and it constitutes a core part of the Ministry’s digital infrastructure for educational content for schools.

Photodentro LOR supports browsing, free text search, and faceted search, allowing users to narrow search results by applying multiple filters, such as learning resources type, educational context, etc.

Photodentro LOR currently hosts more than 4,000 learning objects, organized in thematic or other collections. Most of them have been developed by around 120 qualified teachers, in ten domain-specific workgroups, in the process of enriching Greek textbooks with digital interactive resources. Each group operated under the supervision of a coordinator, an academic with significant domain and pedagogical expertise, to ensure quality. In an attempt to make the most of previous publicly funded projects, the next population phase of Photodentro LOR focuses on open learning objects that can be extracted from existing educational software and learning scenarios developed during the last decade.

Almost all learning objects are “click-and-play”, i.e. they can be directly reproduced in web browsers. Regarding their type, they include explorations and inquiry-oriented activities, dynamic simulations and experiments, educational games, presentations, interactive exercises, interactive maps as well as simple learning assets.

Photodentro LOR implements the Greek National Strategy for educational content, which –among others- promotes the use of open educational resources (OER) for schools. All learning resources are freely available to everyone under the Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Photodentro LOR name has been carefully selected to convey the message of what Photodentro is: a repository that contains “knowledge”; it is alive and grows like trees (in contrary to archives); and it is Greek. The word “Photodentro” means “Light Tree”, and it is taken from the title of the poetry collection “The Light Tree and the Fourteenth Beauty” (1971) of the greek Nobel prize winner Odysseas Elytis.

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