Collaboration: Competitive Advantage

The tools of technology allow for collaboration with others all over the world. Businesses see collaboration as a way to give them a competitive advantage now and into the future.  With mobile devices, communication among groups is possible from just about anywhere. If you think about this in terms of education and schools together with students’ love of social networking, think of what collaboration through technology can do for learning.

Helping All Students Through Teacher Websites

Chris Alper-Leroux’s Best Practice piece, Using Instructional Websites to Differentiate, provides suggestions for teacher sites that go beyond the usual “class syllabi”. As a Grade 8 Earth Science teacher, she and her co-teacher have found that using multiple methods for students to access content through their website is engaging for students and results in fewer behavior problems. They use online texts and texts on CD and post “textbook audio clips to the site....”  Their site also features chapter introduction videos; text chapter sections complete with audio, images and vocabulary videos; mid-chapter reviews, and practice tests.  According to Alper-Leroux, [T]he anywhere, anytime availability of a learning-goal based instructional Website, organized to match the sequence of a chapter or unit, allows in-depth, structured remediation for a student working with adults in resource rooms, study skills classes, support periods or outside of the school environment.”