Teaching tips: The importance of teacher collaboration

As every teacher already knows, the job of a teacher is not only restricted to the classroom. Teaching involves a lot of time spent on planning lessons, creating resources and assessing students' work. Most people who are not teachers do not always appreciate how much time all this takes. Teacher to teacher collaboration can definitely make teaching easier by reducing time spent on planning and creating resources. It can also make teaching more effective when teachers give insight about the abilities or interests of individual students. I will be listing the different ways of teaching collaboration.

• Communication between colleagues: simply communicating with other teachers who are involved with your students' education is enough to find out more about the weaknesses, strengths or interests of the students. Use this knowledge to create more targetted lesson plans. For example: you might learn that your students are very interested in painting, so you might find that using the theme of art in your lessons will help students learn better.
  
• Share resources: why spend time creating lesson plans or resources when another teacher has already done this? Resources do not have to necessarily belong to your students' age group. Talk to the teachers who was teaching your students the year before and ask them for the lesson plans used for a particular subject that you are going to be teaching in the near future. Use this information to tie-in your lessons with what the students have done in previous years. This is a great way of introducing a new lesson.
  
• Share the work load: if you know of teachers teaching the same subject as you, then it might be a good idea to plan your lessons together. Decide on who does what; for example you can work on the lesson plans while the other teacher creates the resources to be used for those lessons.

Please feel free to share more ideas with us by leaving a comment with this post.
Take care, and as always, I'll keep you posted.

Social Networking Websites and Education

It's no secret that many schools discourage the use of social networking sites (SNSs) and some schools even go as far as to block access to these websites. SNSs allow people to publicize a lot of personal information which might jeopardize the professional relationship that teachers need to maintain with their students. There's also the fact that spending too much time on social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, will reduce productivity. However social networking websites are a social phenomenon and it is not showing signs of slowing down. What teachers need to understand is that, on a very basic level, these websites are there to connect people and allow them to communicate better. Education is heavily dependent on communication, so SNSs can be seen as a powerful educational tool.


As I wrote earlier, if you sign up for an account on an SNS you need to make sure that you don't share any personal information that may cause 'role conflicts' in your work place. Having said that, a social networking site will allow you to automatically share important online resources with you colleagues. You might be able to find Social networking sites which offer tools specifically tailored for teachers. These SNSs are sometimes referred to as Niche Social Networking Sites, the niche being education. SNSs will also allow you to easily share with your students, any information related to school and to the subjects you are teaching them. Social networking websites are not only about connecting people, they also offer a new way for encouraging participation through open services.