Introduction to Blending and Online Teaching: Post #5

Create a plan or provide suggestions for ways to make your curated resources a regular part of your planning.

I know I have been guilty of spending hours researching and tweaking a wonderful unit for my kindergarten students, just to find myself scrambling for new resources the following year, either because I didn't write down my resources or I have forgotten about them.  This can be rather frustrating!  Thankfully, with the increase of new technology available, this problem occurs less and less for me all the time!  I frequently utilize Pinterest, creating a board for various units, to house resources and crafts I would like to use in my classroom. I love that it's easy, and I always have my resources at my fingertips.  I can choose to add others to my boards, so they can search for additional resources to add as well.  It has proven to be beneficial for collaboration, as my team doesn't have a lot of face to face time to collaborate with one another.  

My school corporation also recently purchased My Big Campus, which is a great place to store websites, created resources, and just about anything else you may need!  We are in the beginning stages of creating bundles to share with one another, but we have spent much time researching bundles that others have created.  It's been and will continue to be a great tool for our teachers.

Symbaloo is another great tool to utilize.  Tiles can be created of websites, that way you don't forget about them from one year to the next.  My plan to is to create a Symbaloo for my students during our computer lab time.  This way, I will know that they are working on an educational item, but they will have some choice over which website they choose.  If they would like to work on math, they could choose iXL for some math practice.  If they have a letter they are struggling with, they could do some of the free activities on starfall.com.  If they have a topic they would like to learn more about, they could search for non-fiction books on myON. I'm very much looking forward to utilizing these resources more in my classroom.  My students will certainly benefit.