Goal 10 of the 30 goals challenge for educators 2012 is about sharing, one of the most important, if not THE most important skill one teacher should have. As part of my job as an educator, I do share constantly: I share my knowledge with my students, I (hopefully!) share my enthusiasm and passion for languages with my students and colleagues and I share resources with my colleagues at school and online:
- Curriculum: one of my biggest achievements to date has been the introduction of Spanish at my present school. As the teacher in charge of this new subject, I have designed the Spanish curriculum and decided to make it public via a wiki.
- Lessons: I started to use LearnBoost to plan and share lessons. In a matter of minutes, you can create a lesson plan which includes learning goals, different activities and the materials needed. You can also include links such as media files and you can create assessments in the evaluation section to ensure lessons align with your goals. The beauty of it is that you can share your lessons directly on your Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, WordPress, Blogger, or Tumblr account. LearnBoost also allows teachers to grade, keep attendance, and do report cards. You can view one of my lesson plan to teach how to tell the time in Spanish here.
- Best practice: as well as Twitter and Facebook, I use Pinterest to share good practice quickly and effectively. As a teacher, you are busy, therefore you want to be able to glance at ideas as you rarely have time to read or listen to long explanations. With one picture, you can straight away see what the activity or idea is all about.
- Resources and students’ work: I set up a blog for students to view, read and listen to good stuff related to Spanish culture and language, and to also share and view their work. The main goals are for students to keep up with their Spanish and to also share their views in the “comments” section. When they read or listen to other students’ works, they are then able to compare, assess and see how they can improve.
- Assignments: Edmodo is a private chat room. It allows to assign homework as well as to collect and grade students’ work. It also allows to upload, store and share files (including docs, pdf files, presentations, sound and video). I set up two groups, one for my Spanish ab initio class and another group for my Spanish IGCSE students but did very little with it. As a matter of fact I am undecided between staying with it or setting up a Facebook page as I know my students are much more used to it. Most of them have a Facebook account so by liking my page, they will see Spanish or French resources coming up daily or at least regularly. Although I am aware Edmodo is quite different and allows to do more teaching related things such as grading students’ work.
In the past, I also used Slideshare to share presentations in French or Spanish. I created a group for other language teachers to join and share their presentations. I also created a group on Flickr called Images to teach languages where people can share or use photos or videos to teach either a word, a conversation or a grammar point. Although I have let them down, they should still be running on their own!
One short-term goal which is mentioned by Shelly Terrell and that I wish to achieve is to teach my students to use online bookmarking, curation, and aggregation tools to gather and organize their knowledge. Diigo, Delicious or even Storify seem to be good options.
Last but not least, here is a video I posted a few years ago which I think summarizes this goal pretty well:
What about you? What do you share? How do you share it?
Other goals I have accomplished so far: