New Education Site
From viewing the sign-up list on Bloglet, I know some of my readers are not in higher education and I thought of you when I found this site The Teacher's Lounge which is a wiki designed to share ideas, lesson plans, handouts, etc for the K-12 teacher. If you are a school librarian, consider yourself challenged to add any lesson plans including Big6 IL to this site. If you are in academia, please inform your faculty. Having said all that, this site is just beginning what many others such as DiscoverySchool.com and so it may be a bit of reinventing the wheel.
Furthermore, ERIC is also supposed to be repository for classroom materials--or it did until it decided to reinvent itself. (sigh.) [via]
Oh yes, try Merlot which has added 160 new items in the last 30 days.
2 comments:
Hi Linda, and thanks for linking to my Teachers' Lounge site. I wanted to respond to your comment about "reinventing the wheel." I sure hope we're not falling into that trap, since it's exactly the problem the site was created to address.
What differentiates my site from others that it's open to anyone. Most other lesson plan sites feature postings by some kind of webmaster. Even those that welcome submissions have some kind of editorial step that, I suspect, keeps their content from reaching Wikipedia-like levels of quantity and quality. I'm hoping to ensure quailty not through editorial approval but by harnessing the "wisdom of crowds," the collective judgement of teachers in a community of users. (If you're interested in hearing more about this philosophy, it's basically cribbed from "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowieki and "Emergence" by Steven Berlin Johnson.)
Now, the site in its current form doesn't solve these problems. I'm making plans for a more professional successor site with certain features added (a rating or trust system, user profiles to build community, possibly even weblogs for discussion) and a few others, which just seem to add confusion, taken away.
In the meantime, I'd encourage teachers with good resources to keep posting. We'll migrate all the content from the Teacher's Lounge site over to the new one when the time comes.
Thank you for the clarification. I hope some of the librarians take the challenge I issued and provide some ideas for Information Literacy in K-12.
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