I have several collaborative plans on my wiki site at http://computerkiddoswiki.pbwiki.com If you post your lessons for your classes to work on how about sharing the website-That way we are not reinventing the wheel
The wiki is a work in progress and serves a couple of purposes. One is for students and also for the teachers in my building. My plan this year is to publish my lesson plans in google docs, with accompanying resources, tags (keywords), and examples. The goal is to have it become a resource for teachers as one model showing how tools can be connected to curriculum while achieving state standards. Most of the ones I've completed are at the bottom of the class pages.
Edwin,
Great idea for the use of your site. My wiki started out this year as a simple place to keep parents updated on what I was teaching. I naturally added the photo's. Next resources were added as kids wanted to continue to work on projects at home. The teachers in the building got excited by the projects the kids did and so the Teacher Tools area was created. Next I transfered favorite sites from my delicious account and set up great internet sites by subject/topic area.
Then the science teacher agreed to try a collaborate wiki page on biomes. So tghe Biomes interactive page was the first interactive lesson. The kids used the wiki during school, and used the chat pak at home to talk on line and collaborate on their projects. That was only two weeks ago. Now I have worked with other teachers in the building and have 12 interactive pages set up that the classroom teachers can add content to, the kids can work on during class time or at home, and more requests are coming in.
I just got permission to set up Wiki's and allow the kids to have the password so they can create a Wiki on a collaborate project. The simple wiki page has just grown and grown after only 10 weeks.
Your wiki is great! It's amazing how quickly they can grow and become such an integral part of our instruction. Also the versatility is great. They can be white boards, collaborative centers, resource tools, information sources, and even basic writing tools. A lot of a wiki's flexibility, I think, is due to their simplicity.
Very clear and a great tool also for communicating with parents, what is happening in the classroom (let alone all the other great reasons).
I try to create media rich lessons and teach Korean teachers a lot of technology for Language instruction. On our ning you can see examples of some lesson plans I've posted for students that could be adaptable for all grade levels. Materials there to download. I call the series I post daily, "Lessons in a can". The one on commercials would work fo middle/high school.
I teach an Electronic Publishing class to 8th graders. We use a web site for all the tutorials. My favorite program is Flash, and the students seem to like it also. They can do so many creative things with Flash. They also learn Photoshop Elements, Fireworks and Dreamweaver. They make their own web pages, some of which are very good.
Wow Gary,
That stuff is awesome. I am trying to teach myself flash in my "spare time". I am following the tutorials that come with an old version of flash 4.0. Yoiu might be interested in this site http://www.tygh.co.uk/ Geoff Dellow (gd@tygh.co.uk) who lives in the UK has donated his time and many hours to teach kids and teachers flash. He has developed some templates as well. I am still on the early end of the learning curve with Flash- but it looks as my kids would say "Way cool!"