Teachers: Resourcing is Not Cheating!
Dave Nagel
Gone are the days of recreating the wheel every time you plan a lesson. Technology, when it’s good, is very, very good!
Many students already have experienced the social media aspects of the web. They’ve uploaded their own videos to YouTube, their original musical creations to mySpace and photos to Flickr. Applying that interest and knowledge to education is a simple step. The web also has similar sites that have safeguards in place to allow teachers to use the World Wide Web to engage students’ interest, help them learn, and make it fun. Here are some sites that have incredible resources for you as a teacher and your planning, as well as for your students and their learning. These sites have a variety of applications from video-uploading sites to wikis, blogs, and lesson plans!
TeacherTube.com
Teacher and student created videos with an education focus. Has additional features like blogging and allows teachers to flag inappropriate material.
SchoolTube.com
Allows uploading of teacher and student created videos. Has stricter guidelines and only allows media to be shown that adheres to local school policies. It also includes lesson plans and links to other resources!
Edu20.org
“Edu 2.0 is a spectacular example of a learning community done right in terms of the technological sophistication and depth and breadth of resources available. It offers a complete Web-based learning management system for public and private teaching, more than 10,000 shared online resources, and a range of networking and collaboration features--wikis, blogs, feeds, chat, etc.,” said Dave Nagel in his article for THE Journal. “And it also includes assessments, attendance logs, grading, assignments, and many other features found in traditional learning management systems but without the cost of commercial systems and without the hassle of implementing an LMS from scratch.” It also has thousands of resources including links, wikis and blogs.
WikiSpaces.com
Wikispaces offers free services for teachers who want to host classroom wikis. They do have a feature to allow private wikis for small groups. That feature costs $50 a year, but right now, Wikispaces is giving away 100,000 of these sites. Web address is
http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers100K .
Dave Nagel in THE Journal for April 2008 has more free online resources for social media. His article can be found at http://www.thejournal.com/articles/22456 .
