ReadWriteThink (http://www.readwritethink.org/) with Thinkfinity with NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) still has lessons plans, and nice interactive mind maps to go with them.

There are lesson plans and sharing on Discovery Education.

Oh, Matthew Needleman has lesson and resources for the Open Court reading series on his site Open Court Resources (http://opencourtresources.com/)and Blog, Creating Lifelong Learners (http://www.needleworkspictures.com/ocr/blog/). He might be a little shy about bringing that up considering what happened the last time he posted about his site, but the resources on the blog are really good, and yes, they do include some things I’ve done, in the interest of disclosure.

I’m not seeing a lot of Math lessons here, also the first is commercial sponsored (but free), and the second requires that you pay for some form of Discovery Education (streaming, Science, etc.) The best quality materials I’ve seen so far are the AFI video lessons for classrooms at Discovery. Good stuff if you can get it.

I’m sure someone will pipe in with some math resources.

Bill, I think that’s a separate, but very critical point. I think I tend not to use online lessons in structured sites because even if the whole lesson is mapped out, because either due to my students or my arrogance (I’m betting on the later), I usually pretty much rewrite the lesson. I like to hear about and idea of a lesson, or objective, and some key points and riff off of that. Does that mean I’m not playing well with the other children? Not necessarily.
I think the point you bring up is not about our lesson planning, but how we do things like set longer term goals, etc. I recently attended the academic planning session for my schools upper grade. All the 4th-6th grade teachers and most of the “resource” teachers (special education, open court, eld, and me) were there. I think the resource teachers (with the exception of Open Court cause her task is just primary focused–which I disagree with), are all trying to collaborate on what we are doing so it fits in with what the classroom teachers are doing, and what we have to focus on (since we’re in program improvement). The only question I have is how responsible the teachers feel for students in other classes. I see signs they are concerned and are helping, which is minor miracle compared to most schools. That is very rare to find. I’m guessing it’s even worse in High School where the classes/kids are sliced and diced into small discrete boxes.

Oh, Dan,

RE: “Bill Fitzgerald seems to have sacrificed his infant lesson aggregation service at the altar of paid work.” — While it is true that we have been working (and I see that as a *good* thing, as me, my family, and the other primates at the Monkey all appreciate having a roof over our respective heads), the notion that we have abandoned development is a mistaken one.

We do this development on our time, at our expense. I would *love* to have a client/foundation/kind-hearted-soul step up and fund this, but I’m not holding my breath. It makes the development slower than we would like, but it is proceeding.

The good news: the technology needed to put this together already exists. It’s not hard, but it requires some dedicated time to put the pieces together.

The bad news: most of the open repositories balk at putting something as basic as an rss feed on their sites, which complicates reusing content, even content that has been published under an open license. ReadWriteThink is a prime example: nary an RSS feed on the entire site, let alone the lesson plans. This is equally true of many of the university and foundation sponsored repositories.

The resistance to open content is more than just technological. Textbook companies have a lot invested in the notion of selling canned content, and they are not going to loose that cash teat without a serious fight. Add in a fear of failure in an atmosphere dominated by high stakes testing, and we’re starting to melt the tip of this iceberg.

But, as I put in my twitter-feed today (was going to blog it, but didn’t have time): http://twitter.com/funnymonkey/statuses/772918022

Cheers,

Bill

@Bill Fitzgerald – Maybe you already tried this but you might be able to work some fake rss feeds out of those sites in a variety of ways.

Here are two possibilities –
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2004/09/an_rss_hack_for.html
http://www.feedyes.com/

@Tom — thanks for adding these to the list of tricks —

For the more technically inclined, Yahoo! pipes and Grazr can also be used — Tony Hirst, at http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/ , has some great writeups involving these tools.

Another resource I’m looking forward to checking out is Mediawiki’s Send2Wiki extension — http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Send2Wiki — this tools converts a web page into wiki format.

The key, as I see it, is to simplify the process of republishing in a way that permits and simplifies editing and remixing. As A Mercer says, above, “I like to hear about and idea of a lesson, or objective, and some key points and riff off of that.” — given how easy it is to aggregate content, and how easy it is to generate an rss/atom feed from content, there really is no valid technological reason why the large repositories are not exposing their content via rss. And that’s why, although I’m not above using gimmickry to aggregate open content published under a CC license, it’s a little galling that any gimmickry is necessary.

Which gets me to my point, and (I think, anyways) one of Dan’s points: we can do this ourselves. If teachers who blog made a commitment to post one strong lesson a month, we could create a repository of easily re-publishable content. Teachers could work from the comfort of their own blog space — it would mean, of course, not using companies like feedburner, as they don’t respect the tags of the originating blog, and the ability to aggregate based on specific tags is critical to making this work.

If a critical mass of teachers (lets say, for the sake of pulling an arbitrary number, 40) start creating lesson plans on a sufficiently regular basis, I’ll commit to setting up and hosting a site that collects and republishes the content. Heck, I’ll even commit to writing up some best practices to make sure your lessons can be peeled off and aggregated separately from your other content.

And, at the risk of stating the obvious, this site will be ad-free, and yes, it will run on open source code.

So whaddaya say? Will 40 people commit to writing and tagging lessons that allow them to be easily reused and republished?

@Jason, re peer pressure: who, me? :)

All kidding aside, the technology to support a distributed, teacher-driven lesson repository that doesn’t suck is here —

There are several key elements here, but the main point is not requiring teachers to join yet another site, and not requiring teachers to do anything above and beyond their existing workload.

So, if teachers who are already blogging about their lessons started tagging lessons with distinct tags, it would be relatively straightforward to collect these lessons up in one site.

As I see it, the point is less to make every lesson a gem than to share the lessons of which we are proud — if we include a narrative component that covers how the lesson went off, so much the better, but if enough teachers do this, we could, over time, create a valuable resource.

I think Jason made a good point, “…if it ends up fit for public consumption.” This year, nothing I’ve made during this first year is something I would even use again. Let alone suggest that others use.

How long before one is happy with their lessons?

What Jackie and Sarah are saying. And the side note that the first 40 teachers confident enough to sign up, and the first 40 teachers competent enough to write stuff really fit for wide distribution, those sets might not be entirely coextensive.

At I Love Math, outstanding stuff and materials that could use some cleaning up are side by side, and you need to sift through a good deal to find the real gems (what distinguishes I Love Math is, of course, that there is enough of the latter to make it more than worth the time it takes. Most lesson plan sites are a mess – ILM is the only one I’ve continued to use.)

So, what kind of quality control? What about some rating system where, instead of just voting a lesson up for its looking cool, teachers rate lessons by indicating that they have actually used [elements of] the lessons successfully? Or, if some 50 of us (or whatever) wrote something every month, some kind of voting system could determine the best 30 (or so) entries? The rest could be made available too, but somehow in a separate pile.

I’m there with HarryO. Throw them out there. I think a lot of us would love to see what some of you go-getters think are your weakest ideas.

Every time I see someone sticking their curricular neck out in earnest, I can’t help but internalize something positive. Even if the idea sucks, the passion behind it remains, which never ceases to provide a seed of thought that can usually blossom into a slightly less crappy idea of my very own.

It’s like examining one of ya’lls CM scenarios. I may not choose to act like you did it, but that doesn’t mean your experience doesn’t help me figure out my own style. So, consider this a plea from the uninitiated: please, give us your almost-OK lessons. Submit yourself to the court of public opinion with the knowledge that many (if any) of us don’t know any better than you do. I’m certain that I, for one, can’t help but become a better teacher for it.

FWIW

(Still laughing at Neal’s “sticking out their curricular neck” bit. Sounds like a blog title, with some savage chicken image attached.)

@Bill: Regarding “not using … Feedburner,” I’m pretty sure that bloggers (at least, those using WordPress) can have a Feedburner feed, and even have that as the default feed for the site (through the header tag), but still generate tag-specific feeds. A Feedburner plugin, on the other hand, might screw all that up.

Also, if I knew there was a resource like the one you’re proposing here (and particularly if you were involved in developing that resource), I’d happily go back through my old lessons and post the best of what I could find. I haven’t done that so far because I wasn’t sure the effort would be worth the benefit to others if they just sat on my little blog. If they were thrown into a big mix of lesson plans from other teachers, though, then perhaps one or two would be helpful to a few teachers, making all the effort worth it.

So my hand’s in the air.

Ah yes, the old inevitable pile of garbage resulting from collective internet projects paradox…

Well, I for one was speaking largely to those posting on their little old individual blogs. I’m not saying go crazy with the lessons, but one or two a month would be wonderfully useful, at least for someone like me. I suspect most of you would not produce many poor examples that didn’t at least hold a few redeeming qualities.

If we were to create some kind of comprehensive resource, quality control would indeed become more of an issue. A voting system actually could work quite well in my opinion, although it would probably polarize the community at least a little and could lend itself to abuse. An alternative might be to form another group blog a la The Faculty Room or TLN that has a fixed pool of contributors and/or a strict peer review process for any submitted posts, with the topic being 100% curriculum.

For now, I resubmit that all you solo bloggers would be providing a valuable public service to post even just one of your very best lessons. Heck, let’s make it a meme. And you’re all tagged! (I ain’t teaching yet, so I’m exempt, suckers)