Collaborative Technology

As I started to look into the different sites for teacher and student collaboration, I began to get a little lost.  There were so many opportunities I had to really be careful to not spend too much time.  Educators of all kinds have posted and shared lessons and ideas covering the entire gamut of teaching.  As a veteran teacher, I wish I had access to things like this back when I first started.  My first few years would have been so much easier.  I always felt as though I was reinventing the wheel.  Now we have thousands of ideas at the tips of our fingers.  It is reassuring to know when I am stuck with a plan; I can always access a lesson online to see if it fits my classrooms abilities and needs.

There were a few collaborative sites for teachers I really dove into deeply.  The first teacher site was Promethean Planet.  It is a free site with tons of lessons ranging all over the curriculum.  Many of the flip charts I viewed were engaging and extremely colorful to attract the student’s attention.  There were also publisher created resources for a small fee ($5.95).  The teacher collaborative site which was the most intriguing and helpful to me was Teacher.net.  While I was here I found loads of lesson plans, chat boards, projects, job offerings, and classifieds where you could buy or sell items.  This site was almost like a one stop shop type of place.  As an educator you could get totally lost and absorbed into the amount of resources that were present. 

I found the student collaborative sites to be very interesting and engaging.  The first site I checked out was Flat Stanley at Flatterworld.com.  What a great place for kids of all ages.  My daughter came home a couple of years ago with this project called Flat Stanley.  We mailed him off to various relatives and had them take pictures of him while he was with them.  I thought this was a great idea.  However, I did not know it was a website designed for student collaboration.  FlatterWorld was a great place to find flash cards, a game for learning your states, an ABC monster to assist with the alphabet, and even a cool teacher timer to display on the computer or projector.  This site was extremely friendly, engaging and colorful.  One last aspect I enjoyed was the APPS available for the common core standards.  This was at an additional cost, but a great resource for teachers.  A second collaborative site I viewed was websirationclassroom.com.  This site had a subscription fee of $39 a year.  It is a great place for students to be able to gather information, brainstorm, and organize their ideas for a writing solid project.  This site not only was about the writing process, but also assisted the students with critical thinking skills. 

Today’s technology has really put educators all over the world in touch with each other.  I was impressed with the amount of resources accessible.  Two lessons caught my attention and I plan to use them in my classroom in the future.  Holli Cooper developed the first lesson I viewed.  It was a flip chart on dividing decimals by powers of ten.  This flip chart was extremely colorful, engaging, and continually reinforced the concept.  Each slide had the phrase “when I divide my number should get smaller” or “when I multiply my number should get bigger”.  This constant repetition is exactly what my intensive and ELL student’s need.  Jessica Cole wrote the second lesson I viewed on Teachers.net.  Her lesson was a review of adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing of decimals.  It was a real world problem application involving grocery sales ads.  What a fabulous way to make a lesson relevant and engaging!  In the near future I plan to not only use both of these plans, but also the teacher and student collaborative sites I viewed.  What a fabulous opportunity we have to be educators in this digital age.