OEG Voices 056: OE Award Winner Giovanni Zimotti

Originally published at: OEG Voices 056: OE Award Winner Giovanni Zimotti – OEGlobal Voices

Just in time for the opening of nominations on May 15, 2023 for the 2023 OE Awards for Excellence and in the theme of being inpsired by previous winners, we are sharing a conversation we recorded with Giovanni Zimotti who was recognized in 2022 with an OE Award in the Educator category. As Director of Spanish Language Instruction at the University of Iowa, Giovanni has taken on applying and developing Open Educational Resources in the Spanish courses and has led the development of several open textbooks, two of which are focused on Spanish in professional fields (healthcare and education). Listen…

Just in time for the opening today for the 2023 OE Awards for Excellence. – listen to the voice of last year’s winner of the Educator Award, Giovanni Zimotti, and OER creator and advocate from the Spanish Languages department at the University of Iowa.

Be inspired by Giovanni and other previous winners of the Educator Award of Excellence as you ponder perhaps who you might nominate in the Educator Award category.

Also, note the mention of the Greyled OER platform Giovanni briefly mentioned, in a followup message he shared:

About Greyled, we were lucky enough to secure some fundings and we are currently developing the app. We have a small team that is developing everything. We should have a beta within 2 months that we will share with all educators interested. If everything goes well I should be able to test it during the Fall semester. We are creating an entire learning system with OER textbooks as the centerpiece, with an ecosystem of functionality surrounding them (e.g., interactive and gradable activities, collaborative note taking). And the most important part of all is that professors will not only be able to share the actual textbook, but also all the ancillary materials that come with it. So, after 3 professors use the same textbook, a fourth professor will be able to pick and choose between all their activities. I am very excited about it.

If this sounds interesting, you can request an invite from the site and let us know too below so we can maybe persuade Giovanni to provide us a demo.