Hi, Dan.

Thanks for the props.

I realize that I share far less than I ought/would like, and for all of the reasons you list.

It is like a game of Texas Hold ‘Em, isn’t it, this lack of sharing, between and amongst teachers, whether within the same building, or, in the blogophere?

BTW: Zero and counting on the Tic-Tac-Toe post. :)

Miss Profe

Felicitaciones on being named Best New Blog. Mad props to you.

oh, for math on the sly (such as days before holidays, or after testing, or any day the kids want a break), i swear by this book. they’re not “assign & forget” worksheets – they’re explorations that are open ended enough to allow kids to find both their own comfort level and interesting aspects.

You’ve made a really good point. I’m lucky to be at a school that shares extensively and I’ve never thought about broader sharing. I love reading your lessons (even though I teach elementary) and gain ideas from them all the time. I agree with fgk that a lot of what’s out there is crap, but to me that suggests that finding lessons on blogs I read would be fantastic. I already know that I respect these folks as educators, I’d love to see what’s happening in their classrooms.

One resource for specific questions (like a check-out system or group work) is http://tat.clairvoy.com/tiki-view_blog.php?blogId=2. It’s elementary focused because it’s elementary teachers answering the questions. But things like a check-out system might work there.

What about TeacherTube?

http://www.teachertube.com/

Also, it seems to me that a wiki would be a better tool to share teaching tips that a blog.

All I Ever Really Needed to Learn I Learned in Kindergarten…Lesson #1 Share Everything.

I preach that everyday.

What’s interesting is that the blogosphere is the perfect medium in which to share ideas like that. There’s nothing new under the sun–it’s just a matter of sharing the wealth for the betterment of our students.

Dan,

For starters, can you please upload your “video sub lesson plan” for us to see?

I would love to see and hear you in action…

Thanks,
Philip

I pondered doing this back when I set up my blog, in fact, it was one of the things I was going to do. I think the thing that stopped me from doing it was that I always felt at the end of every lesson, ‘that would have been better if…’, but never had the time to fix it. But I was also unwilling to post something I knew wasn’t as good as it could have been.

In the UK, there are quite a few History teachers using http://www.historyshareforum.com to share resources and it does work pretty well, as it tends to weed a lot of the rubbish out. However, there are always concerns over copyright issues, as many of my resources are designed to compliment specific textbooks, and include extracts and images taken directly from them. Maybe I just need to create more original stuff.

OK, Dan. Just for you*, an early New Years resolution. Over the holiday’s I’ll get round to sharing a bunch of resources on the blog, and with fingers crossed and a fair wind behind me, keep it up through ’08.

*Well, hopefully not ‘just for you’, otherwise it would be a bit of a waste.

I think we should talk more in terms of ‘ideas’ we can share rather than ‘lessons’ we can share. It’s what makes the lesson collections on line not so valuable, but makes teachers talking to each other worthwhile.

I will not play a game where kids conjugate verbs (I teach math), but maybe a Hollywood Squares with factoring?

Groups? My groups usually have three kids in them. One facing forward, two in front of that one, face-to-face sideways. Why? No one with their back to the front of the room… Take it, leave it, remember it, forget it. It’s an idea, not a lesson. If someone wants it, easy to use.

Hello, all,

This is a great thread — some ideas that have arisen in a couple places that bear highlighting/repeating:

1. Teachers plan in different ways, as such, canned formats limit creativity, where the open structure of the blog support individual differences by *not* imposing an artificial structure

2. The current lesson depots are, to be polite, not that good.

3. The stories and the narrative of how a class unfolded add value to a lesson.

4. I’d like to add that, if given a choice between sharing something incomplete or not sharing at all, sharing the incomplete resource at least opens up the potential for someone else to benefit. If the lesson creator indicates that the resource is incomplete, so much the better. Sharing is good.

Toward that end, I started working on a site last night that can be used to aggregate lessons. I’d be willing to build and host this as a resource. One of the main advantages of this site is that people can continue to work from their blogs, s there is no added workload (on top of creating the lessons, and blogging them, of course, which is the hardest part).

The site is *not done yet* — the pre-alpha version is here:
http://threeclicks.org/lessons

I’ll be rolling in some changes/improvements in the next 48 hours or so.

Cheers,

Bill

An exception to the rule of useless databases of shared lesson plans is I Love Math. I’ve found really good stuff there that I’ve used again and again. Check out the Slope puzzles and the Partner Problems in the Algebra section. Some kids are so happy when they get to do the same old math by cutting and pasting little pieces of colored paper in the process (Slope Puzzles) – and the Partner Problems, where horizontally aligned problems have the same answers, give students instant feedback on whether their work is correct.

I Love Math is also where Dan Greene posts materials for Algebra II, and much of that is just great – check the worksheet on Complex Numbers, for example.

I can imagine much good coming of this call for more posts on actual lessons taught, and will try and follow up on it in a few days. Just now getting grades updated is a more urgent matter, though.

I’ve gotta echo H’s comments here. Dan Greene’s stuff is really good. He does a nice job with multiple representations.

So, I put in a little more time tonight and the site is at a place where it is starting to take shape — it’s not done, but it’s at the point where it can at least be useful.

If you navigate to http://threeclicks.org/lessons/ you can see the lessons/blog posts that have been imported into the site.

We have some ideas on things to add in as far as functionality, but would also like to get feedback on how things look so far.

Some quick notes:

All content on the site is full-text searchable, and tagged by keywords.

This site does not require anybody to join a new site, or to use a different blogging platform. If your current site can generate an rss feed, we can aggregate it on this site.

All content in this site in turn can be redistributed via rss feeds, and every tag generates a specific rss feed.

Over time, as people share resources, they will be collected in this site. I’m looking at this as a starting point — with the data in this site, we can look at a variety of options over time — things as simple as user ratings and comments, and moving to a community-edited resource.

However, I need to stress this: the more people contribute, the better this will become! If you find yourself saying, “I’m not comfortable putting my stuff out there” — well, now’s the time to get comfortable putting your stuff out there. The more people look at lessons, comment on lessons, and reap the benefits of the ideas others have put into lessons, the more we all benefit.

So, share some lessons, suggest some feeds, and give some feedback: http://threeclicks.org/lessons/contact

Cheers,

Bill

On a related note, I was disappointed to see that the ilovemath site did not generate an rss feed — it’s built using Joomla, so it should be able to generate feeds — if anyone knows the people running the site, it would be great to have feeds of new content coming out of the site.

@Druin,

It may be frustrating that others aren’t sharing as much but that can’t be the motivation. I’d share my stuff with you or anyone, whether or not they return the favor.

Perhaps we should call it giving instead of sharing.

For some reason my entry was held for comment moderation (Dan — what was that?) so that Druin’s entry was posted before my mention of her site. I do feel a bit bad now — it is true that I have been liberally using materials from I Love Math and other sites without contributing myself. Now this is also the first year that most of my materials are entirely electronic instead of more messy hybrid worksheets with graphs and annotations penciled in… and the quality of my the stuff can’t compare with the best at I Love Math. On the other hand, imperfect starting points can be useful too, and as a result of this exchange I might spend a day or two in a coffee shop this Winter Break, adding my few cents worth to the communal pot.

However — someone just has to be the best, and while arriving first is lonely and breaking trail is hard work, that doesn’t mean that the efforts since 1999 toward exchange of materials weren’t worthwhile and must be part of an impossible project. And while mutuality would evidently be more welcome than appreciation, do know that materials from I Love Math saved several lessons for me in an awfully difficult school with very low skilled students last year. Thankyouthankyouthankyou.

To Sarah… I’m not sure what you mean by no exponents on ILoveMath – there are 12 files listed there, but I don’t teach Algebra, so I will admit that not much of that is mine. There are 2 searches – the one on the left sidebar will search through the links, the one at the top when you are in the lesson plans section will search through the documents and files.

To H… I do appreciate that you are using ILoveMath. I freely support and share whatever I can. I have always vowed that any website that I own will be 100% free to users and 100% ad-free. The site only grows because of the membership. I am so grateful that you found materials there that were useful to you. I have not had much time to work on it lately because I’ve been totally revamping my Geometry curriculum due to the new state End of Instruction exam and trying to support the Collaboration of teachers at my site (for anyone interested in seeing how I share and support the teachers at my site, please visit http://jenkscollab.math911.net). Each chapter, I try to search the web for the absolute best resources for teachers to use in the classroom. The purpose is to save them time so they can spend the time on creative lessons. I also use the site to help with Best Practices, although I’ve gotten a bit lax on that *shame on me*.

Anyway, the point of this very long comment is that you are all more than welcome to post anything you wish to post at ILoveMath. If there are certain file extensions that you need, let me know – only the most common are currently in my list because those are the ones that I use most often.

Thanks for your continued support – I’m sorry this sounds like an ad, because I rarely spread the word that I am the person behind the server :)

To Druin:

Ahhhhh…. (I swear my housemate must think I’m crazy for all the noises I’m making at my computer right now.)

I was using the wrong search function. (And even with your description, it took me a while to get over the search at the top of every page as the “second” search.) Your site just got so much better for me. Though now I need to remind myself to come up with tomorrow’s quiz questions rather than search for things that are already over for the year.

To H: I’ll join you in the day or two in a coffee shop over break to get some of my two cents out there. Though, despite everyone’s encouragement, I may focus on developing stories without my materials for now. Because while imperfect starting places are something, I can give links to the places that I stole from.

@Tom — you mean you weren’t always a surly old blogger? :)

And don’t even get me started on the Ning/Twitter effect. There are times when I feel that huge swaths of the educational blogosphere are crows running after shiny things.

RE: “There are technologies well suited to organizing all this stuff – web ontologies and the like – but essentially, developing that stuff is nobody’s job, or job description, so it is unclear how it would ever happen” — absolutely. And that is why, in the face of that reality, using the blog as a container is a decent starting point — simple enough for most people to use, and flexible enough to hold whatever we throw at it. Most decent blogging software also supports at least rudimentary metadata (very rudimentary, in the form of tags), which should be enough to get things started.

@ Dan — RE: “After posting a lesson here, I want to head to a site, input my trackback URI into a field, add some tags, checkboxes for recommended grade level, etc., and then add it to the index.” — This is very achievable as an add-on to the site I created over the last couple days. This would simply be a form with fields for a URI, description, and some taxonomy categories (for the checkboxes).

This functionality, combined with aggregating selected feeds (and possibly some code in the background to automatically prune imported blog posts on specifically defined conditions) would be a good first pass at the “Flickr of lesson sites” —

I also think that some similar filtering could be accomplished by community-applied tags, and a user ratings system that would bury less relevant content.

RE: “(Except, of course, because no one’s raising a hand to code the thing?)” — while I can’t drop everything and immediately put development hours into perfecting this, I am more than willing to put the time into spec’ing a prototype and, where possible, bootstrapping either our internal dev work or development that is released back into the Drupal community into improving the site.

So, consider my hand raised. From the comments in this thread, it seems like there are a few other folks with development chops as well. I also think that a site like this, developed as a project used for Open Educational Resources, running on Open Standards, and powered by Open Source code, could actually attract additional development funding once we had a solid proof of concept.

The key is a tool that is simple to use, leverages existing work by educators without placing an additional burden on educators, and supports involvement within the community at a variety of levels — from the passive content browser, to the commentor/rater, to the lesson-blogger, to the lesson-developer, to the site maintainer.

Which, as I said earlier, we pretty much have now.

Cheers,

Bill