Team Wiki = Success

Our group of Melissa, Meredith, and myself created a great Wiki called Teacher Tech Tools. It's all about different synchronous and asynchronous technologies available on the internet and how they can be adapted for use in the next generation classroom. Check it out for some great ideas and feel free to comment with other ideas or experiences with these tools.

That's Delicious

This is an incredibly useful tool for me as a student, but also as a future teacher! This can be used in a number of ways for students to organize their own educations. In planning an event, someone could find a number of websites that relate to their wedding (for example) like a florist, DJ, limousine services, and catering hall related to a wedding. The planners could tag a number of websites that delineate which particular parts of the wedding a certain website relates to so that they can be easily accessed to compare prices, inquire about dates, etc. The same philosophy goes for writing a research paper or completing a group project. The websites can be saved to a central location online so that the websites can be accessed from anywhere without having to carry around a single computer. This is a more advanced version of using favorites which save only on that one computer. It also allows students in a group the opportunity to do work at home by either having a group delicious account or "friending" each other so that they can view what their group mates are posting as useful websites. It helps the project run more smoothly and students can develop it better.

Great post from an RSS Feed

This is the latest post that I read on the World History Blog. It's an article discussing online courses about Medieval History that are available for free through different universities.While it should be obvious that these FREE courses aren't for credit as a part of a program, people are still able to watch lectures and review materials that are used in these very classes. These aren't just any universities that are leading the way in this project either. Three of the most notable schools are MIT, Notre Dame, and the University of Washington. Future teachers in the social studies field should take full advantage of these resources to help supplement their own classes. It is a perfect opportunity for teachers to strengthen an area in the curriculum that they may be unsure about or to incorporate some of the primary source documents into their own classes. In searching further through the World History Blog, I found that it was not just Medieval history that was available for free, but also additional European history, Asian history, and African history just to name a few.

The possibilities of use of this material are endless. Teachers should always be willing to expand their knowledge base so that they can best educate their students. Pedagogy is an important and necessary part of teaching, but it goes nowhere if a teacher is not knowledgeable in their content area. These free courses are a CHEAP and easy way for teachers to learn or refresh material for a unit that they will have to teach in their own classrooms.