Today I had a really good discussion with some other staff from school. We were discussing the best solution for pooling together the wealth of information teachers often collect individually to help facilitate a new learning context, especially web links and tools.
The discussion came about from the teachers’ use of forums, used to generate discussion around their personal goals, progress and feedback from mentors, of school and EHSAS cluster goals.
The forums are starting to be used for more than just of goals, and teachers are throwing in web links and ideas, not directly related to the forum topics. You know what it is like, throw a bunch of teachers in a room and they’ll talk shop, jumping from one idea to the next with a bit of personal news thrown in. Transfer this to a forum environment and you know what I mean.
Does this unorganised jumble of links needs to be addressed? Reorganised to allow easier access to the links? Or should we just leave it as is?
Some other questions raised:
- Do teachers want to have a list of elearning resources (i.e. web links) gathered for them before a context of learning is about to begin?
- Do teachers generally find these resources a week before they need it, when the plan it, or just in time?
- How do they access or find them? Word of mouth? Delicious? RSS? Googled?
- Should we expect teachers to understand RSS? subscribing? news readers?
- Do we need to teach specific skills related to the use of online forums?
Lots of questions and to be honest, we came up with no one-answer-fits-all solution, or if there even needs to be a solution.
What is important is that teachers are engaged and active with online forums to support, improve andss share their classroom practice. That is just great!
#feeds #forum #rss #weblinks
Home | Leadership Infusion 