Tools For Teachers
As a teacher, it is important to have a variety of resources to use in order to communicate and collaborate efficiently with students. In today's world, everything is done online, so it is crucial to have an online tool that is simple to use and allows a teacher and a student to organize their work online. After some researching, I found the Live Binders website. Live Binder is what it sounds like, an online collection of work, images, websites, and videos that can be neatly organized and shared with others. To keep a class organized, a teacher can start by making a shelf with all the students' binders in it, that way she can check them as needed. Making a shelf for each class is a good idea. From there, the teacher can make her own binder organized by tabs and subtabs on lessons, thematic units, extra credit, or anything else. This ensures that students always know where to go to get information for their class.
Students should then make their own Live Binder organized however the student or teacher prefers. The student can make it public or private or even password protected. Having all the work online takes away the excuse of "I forgot my homework" or even "I didn't know the instructions!" Students can add collaborators to a binder in order for groups to work together. This tool is useful, easy to understand, and best of all, Free!
http://www.livebinders.com/welcome/home
As a teacher, it is important to have a variety of resources to use in order to communicate and collaborate efficiently with students. In today's world, everything is done online, so it is crucial to have an online tool that is simple to use and allows a teacher and a student to organize their work online. After some researching, I found the Live Binders website. Live Binder is what it sounds like, an online collection of work, images, websites, and videos that can be neatly organized and shared with others. To keep a class organized, a teacher can start by making a shelf with all the students' binders in it, that way she can check them as needed. Making a shelf for each class is a good idea. From there, the teacher can make her own binder organized by tabs and subtabs on lessons, thematic units, extra credit, or anything else. This ensures that students always know where to go to get information for their class.
Students should then make their own Live Binder organized however the student or teacher prefers. The student can make it public or private or even password protected. Having all the work online takes away the excuse of "I forgot my homework" or even "I didn't know the instructions!" Students can add collaborators to a binder in order for groups to work together. This tool is useful, easy to understand, and best of all, Free!
http://www.livebinders.com/welcome/home
Chapter 3 Response
I found the chapter over communication and collaboration using technology very interesting because as someone who grew up using technology relatively early in school, I do not often think about how and why these tools are important. Teachers often use the same tools or same types, something I always thought was a coincidence, but after reading this chapter I now know that there is a reason. This reading changed the way I view communication and collaboration with technology because I now know how much it changes the way students work. For example, the article talks about how collaboration with technology works so well since students feel as if they have more to contribute and can work without special boundaries. Work is not just limited to school or the classroom, students can work from home. This takes off stress of time constraints teachers and students often have. The reading also changed my view through high lighting the importance of what tools teachers choose. Tools that are labeled as “interactive” or often not so. Interactive tools mean that the student is collaborating with another person or even multiple people. Interacting with a computer is not enough to consider it collaborative work. Tools that allow collaboration and sharing between multiple people are the types of programs that should be used in a classroom. Teachers should also make sure that the programs are safe for students to use. Students should not be prompted for personal information, identities, passwords, or be exposed to material they would otherwise not be allowed to be exposed to in a school setting. For example, you would probably not want students using a site like myspace for their projects. Even though it allows for organization and collaboration, students may be exposed to content that is not appropriate for them. Apart from choosing appropriate tools, the article also talked about skills necessary when using communication and collaboration tools. The ones that I believe are the most important are ones aimed towards the teacher, who should be leading the class. The article points out that teachers should be providing feedback, scaffolding, helping strategize, setting clear goals for the students, and helping students overcome any technological difficulty that may come up. It is easy for a teacher to let students work on their own when using technology, but teachers must be involved in every step, assuring that students are on task, have all questions answered, and have clear directions. The reading also has skills that would benefit students, such as how to plan out your project using three major steps: planning, development, and analysis and evaluation. With guidance from this article, it is easy for a teacher to choose what projects and tools will be best to create a mode of communication and collaboration in a classroom.