Sharing Publications

Sharing resources is something I have always been an advocate of. I encourage teachers on my team to share and collaborate so that together we can all learn from each other. During my discussion for my Digital Resources class, my collaboration group discussed different resources we use to learn more about technology as well as the resources we use in our own digital environments. Below are the resources I shared with my group.

Topics of interest:

Two topic of interest to me are related to blended learning. Both deal with innovation plan. The first is how blended learning affects student engagement, and the second is how applying choice boards in a station rotation model can increase learning by incorporating the COVA approach. 

Online Publications:

EdTech Magazine

Educational Week

Edutopia

Blended Learning Universe

Digital Environments

Google Drive

Groups.io

Group Me

email/text messages

Social media

blogging

Zoom/Webex

To elaborate on this I would say that Google Drive has been a lifesaver for me in my district. When it was first implemented, teachers were still dumping things on their desktops or district servers. When these drives were cleaned they were losing all of their work if not saved to a flash drive. There was no real-time collaborating and sharing resources was optional (some refused to do it). I’ve worked on 3 separate teams where I have set up the Google Drive to allow for us to collaborate on lesson plans and share resources. This has completely changed the mindset about collaboration and I feel it has aided in building stronger teaching teams. Everyone feels their input is being used and valued. 

One other resource we use at my campus, which was implemented by our new principal, was Group Me. While this could’ve been used as a collaborative tool, I think it has mostly become an inclusive social media group for the campus. The response has been mixed. Most teachers had to mute it after about a month because there was no way to disconnect from work on the weekends. I think the improvement for this one relies on the intention.