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Will a virtual bank for teachers to share ideas revolutionise lesson planning or stifle creativity?

At present, most teachers wince at the very mention of virtual learning platforms. Most VLPs are a horrific combination of required - the government has declared that all schools must have one - and useless. Unconnected and underdeveloped, many VLPs are devoid of content: empty cathedrals, monuments to technological failure.

"The students we teach come from a media age; they are visually bombarded from every angle. As teachers we have to compete against their entertainment. A worksheet is not enough to engage them any more."

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Building a Learning Community Palloff and Pratt recommend seven basic steps for building a successful learning community. These include: clearly defining the purpose of the community, creating a distinctive gathering place for the group, promoting effective leadership from within, defining norms and a clear code of conduct, allowing for a range of member roles, allowing for and facilitating of subgroups, and allowing members to resolve their own disputes. The authors caution that it is possible to develop a community that has strong social connections between the students, but where very little learning actually takes place. Thus, it is important that the instructor be actively engaged in the process and encourages students who stray from the learning goals of the course. Specifically, the authors recommend: (1) engaging students with subject matter, (2) accounting for attendance and participation, (3) working with students who do not participate, (4) understanding the signs of when a student is in trouble, and (5) building online communities that accommodate personal interaction. Indicators of a Successful Learning Community You can tell if the learning community is working when you see: active interaction, sharing of resources among students, collaborative learning evidenced by comments directed primarily student to student rather than student to instructor, socially constructed meaning evidenced by agreement or questioning, with the intent to achieve agreement on issues of meaning, and expressions of support and encouragement exchanged between students, as well as willingness to critically evaluate the work of others. Finally, they suggest that the keys to successful learning communities are honesty, responsiveness, relevance, respect, openness, and empowerment. Palloff, R.M. & Pratt, K. (1999). Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

One of the tasks which ed tech coordinators are landed with is cajoling other teachers to use the technology in their lessons. And not just in a one-off or a tokenistic way, either. No! You’re expect to persuade them, somehow, that this is the way of the future and that they should therefore cast aside all their old, non-techie teaching methods and step into this brave new world.

Fundamentally, what you need to have in order to succeed as an ed tech coordinator, is not so much a technical understanding of computers, but an intuitive understanding of people.

I reasoned that nobody in, say, the English department would listen to me telling them how they could improve their teaching of English if they used the right software or device. But they probably would listen to one of their co-workers in the same department.

Lessonwriter creates lesson plans and instructional materials for teaching English language skills from any reading passage