How can we share what is working as strengths at other school in order to utilize this information at our school?
there are many wiki sites that allow you to post ideas. Also some of our PD has allowed teachers to share ideas and help each other
I don't know the answer to this, but I would be very interested in joining in.
Maybe we can start a data base or bank that teachers can post ideas in that have worked for them.
I agree with Cathy. There should be a bank for teachers to post ideas and add lessons. All teachers should be able to access them when planning a lesson.
When we were first introduced to BT, I thought it was great how we could post lessons and resources. The reality of BT is that very few people ever contribute to posting resources and lesson plans. I know I am guilty of not adding to the resources.
I like the idea of some type of collaboration with same grade levels across the district online but will it be successful? One thing that makes online collaboration successful is being anonymous (people are only known by their username). If you go to many big education forums like proteacher.com, you will find great collaboration between educators. I really think what makes it successful is people aren't afraid to ask questions even if they sound silly and people are more willing to share because you are anonymous unless you choose not to be.
I would like the idea of a bank of lessons and teachers asking for help and others answering. Reading what others are asking often prompts me to think about things differently myself. I also agree with the comments about teachers needing to feel totally comfortable with the various formats before trying to instruct the students on them!
A forum might be better. Teachers can not only post ideas but also problems that they are having. There are some excellent ones to develop a model from. For example, Apple has a variety of forums that are specific to certain areas of interest. No reason why as a district we couldn't do something like that.
I would like to see a bank of lesson plans where I can go when putting a lesson together.
BT could be a posting place for lessons, though I share with new teachers and have shared many through trainings, I am guiltly of not posting lessons on BT also
I think we should all commit to share through what ever avenue the District make available. Want to start small send me lessons with standard clearly identified and I will forward to my newbies.
Chris,
Remember when we tried to have district Wednesdays that brought all of the teachers in the district of a grade level together for PD? The biggest flop factor was space and the second was minimal access to the presentors because of the large numbers. Well, what if we use Web 2.0 to help us to connect and collaborate with each other and address your topic of sharing what is working for other sites/teachers?!
I think this is a great idea. Perhaps it could be set up so that all teachers would do a district Wedesday collaboration in a chat room with their peers. Questions/topics could be provided in advance, so teachers could be prepared for the discussion. There could even be a district moderater (just like there would have been in a "face to face" meeting) to facilitate the discussions. This would truly be collaboration!
This could be easily implemented in Moodle. What we are all doing right now with the Project Red Seminar only scratches the surface of the tools that are available in Moodle for collaboration.
That truly is a great idea. We as educators need to feel comfortable with this method of communication before we can start having our students do it themselves. Having teacher chat rooms as collaboration would help those teachers not so comfortable with computers feel more successful. As people say..."practice makes better." and many people learn by doing. However, this also makes me wonder...How will teachers be accountable? Is there a way to keep track of teacher collaboration?
I agree that we need to use the tools we expect our students to use, and I know the chapter says that online collaboration was a key factor. I have never participated in an online discussion board until I took an online college course and even though I found posting to the discussion board to be a "pain", I did find the discussions informative and helpful. I always came away with an idea or a website I did not know about before by reading the weekly postings room from my other classmates. Using this Moddle forum as actually been helpful because I can see how this could be used with my students.
But getting back to using discussion boards for our Wednesday collaboration would be difficult because right now it is difficult to find the time just to collaborate with your team mates right in the same building, image how difficult it would be to get all teachers to collaborate online. But I think having a place for all teachers to post ideas/lessons for other teachers would be helpful. Especially since we are all on the same calender since we are using Beyond Textbooks- I know it would be helpful for me to have a place to reach out to other teachers that teach the same grade level or content area in our district when I am having trouble coming up with another way to teach plurals or another way to extend the learning to challenge students.
I would agree that district-wide networking would be one way to collaborate about programmatic and implementation ideas. Additionally, with the online opportunity, we might expand this collaboration to out-of-district participants, at some point.
There appear to be a number of ways for teachers to collaborate. As Cindy pointed out, the issue becomes one of time and opportunity. Moodle is one avenue available but for teachers to invest they must feel they have the chance to utilize information in their classrooms with a degree of ease and immediacy.
One way to start is at your building level. Our technology facilitator has set up a forum in moodle that we are asked to contribute to on a weekly basis. We are just getting started, but perhaps looking at sharing ideas/lessons in a small group, i.e., teams, grade levels, school and then across schools or grade levels might be the way to get started. I think with the new planning going on with scope and sequence, that teachers will have other opportunities to start posting lesson plans and share ideas. We will look back at these comments in a year and be amazed at what progress will be made with submissions, discussions and student results. I saw one school in Vail where they take 5 minutes each week to share a new technology idea/lesson/website. This can be done in a forum, on a collaboration Wed. and then see what ideas were most beneficial for the group.
The initial question asked in the posting was: How can we share what is working as strengths at other schools in order to utilize this information at our school?
I was hoping that we would use this site to start. What key implementation factors are being implemented successfully at your sites? The word 'successfully' throws me off because we are in the beginning stages of this new second-order technology change.
At this time, the only factor we are close to being successful with is number one, intervention classes. Our reading intervention classes integrate technology every class period. Our math intervention classes use VMath, but the technology is not integrated on a daily basis.
Hopefully, our new Learning Management System will be easier to post lessons and successful strategies.