Collaborative Teaching

It is an interesting concept to collaborate via technology. I can honestly say, this never occurred to me, nor did I realize this existed. I thought I’d reached teaching Mecca when I found Teacherspayteacher.com. Looking through the collaborative sites was informative and overwhelming at the same time. Exploring the sites, I found Share My Lesson to be easy to use and allowed me to limit who I shared the information with during each lesson. This offers a level of privacy and limits the online “dredge” of information overload which can occur when it is a public setting. As I was trying to explore with Curriki, I felt it was too busy and complicated. This might just be my limited knowledge of technology, but sometimes it can be overwhelming when sites offer too many options. I felt the same way about Learnist. My thoughts lead me to wonder if part of my frustration is the grade level in which I’m seeking collaborative efforts. Is Kindergarten not a hot topic; clearly not as hot as geometry topics. I found many opportunities to collaborate on that topic. My favorite site is Google for Educators. My class takes a virtual fieldtrip around the United States to see the nation’s symbols and landmarks. I could see the virtual fieldtrip offerings on Google Connected Classrooms being beneficial and more meaningful than the PowerPoint presentations we use for our trip.

In the realm of Collaboration for Students, I could envision using Skype to talk with classrooms in other states. This is actually a project my sister-in-law and I have talked about. She runs the learning lab for the University of Montana and we think it would be great to connect our classrooms through a shared project and Skype. The roadblocks have more to do with hardware deficiencies than desire. Voice Thread would also be an appropriate venue for Kindergarten. It would be fun to use Voice Thread as a means of storytelling with another classroom – in the building or across the country. How fun would it be to try it with our book buddies and use it to tell fantastic stories.

One thing I would like to try is a collaboration project with our third grade book buddies. Using Share My Lesson, the other teacher and I can devise how to make a shared storytelling lesson and use VoiceThread as the technology for the students. The students would initially collaborate on paper, deciding on the story plot together. Then the kindergarten students would start the thread and the third grade buddies would continue it; passing it back and forth between classes two times. Once the story is complete, the partners would collaborate on illustrating the story. The teachers would scan the illustrations and work to aligning them with the story. If the story could be published, it would make a great school auction item!

There is so much to offer teachers and students. It is shaping up to be a busy summer of exploring more of these technologies in order to provide more opportunities in the classroom; even for little ones.