Google Communities in the Classroom
The Google+ site/app is an amazing tool for both teachers and emerging teachers. Google+ allows you to be apart of some amazing communities that ultimately makes you a better teacher. There are thousands of different communities to join and these communities allow teachers to join together, share lesson plans, discuss ideas, and collaborate with one another. This site is a great way to learn new teaching styles, and is a great way to challenge yourself in learning more in order to become a better teacher.
In my own personal search on Google+, I focused on finding communities that best fit my own content area as a future educator. As a future History/Social Studies teacher, I was able to find dozens of different communities that related to the subject. My favorite being the U.S History Teachers community. This community is a group of hundreds of history teachers that are constantly having group discussions about events in history, trying to get different perspectives from each other. I thought this community was really neat because when I first started scrolling down their timeline, there was a man who asked for help in making a lesson plan fun for his 7th grade students. He said he was teaching about "bleeding Kansas" and was looking for ideas to make his lesson plan engaging and useful. Within a short period of time, someone responded by saying that he had taken his class on a field trip to Lawrence Kansas and shown them the downtown areas where Quantrill raided. He said that there was numerous places and spots that had a cool story about bleeding Kansas and that he was willing to help share those ideas with him. I learned from this guy that Quantrill stormed Lawrence during "bleeding Kansas" and killed hundreds of residence and burned down a part of their town.
Another Google+ Community I recommend is the "Teachers Helping Teachers" community. This is by far the best community I have found if you are looking for ideas or have questions about lesson plans. This site is full of teachers asking for help on a subject, and also teachers posting really cool ideas that worked great in their classroom. You can learn so much great material from this community. When looking through Teachers Helping Teachers, I learned from a teacher that theres a website about "role playing" in the classroom. She said that she has used games from this website and it has given her classroom much enthusiasm and excitement. She stated that these role playing games kept kids engaged and that she loved the participation of the students. She directed people to the website with all of the role playing activities. I thought that was so cool. Apparently that is a new trend in classrooms today, role playing activies and that is something cool that I had learned.
In my own personal search on Google+, I focused on finding communities that best fit my own content area as a future educator. As a future History/Social Studies teacher, I was able to find dozens of different communities that related to the subject. My favorite being the U.S History Teachers community. This community is a group of hundreds of history teachers that are constantly having group discussions about events in history, trying to get different perspectives from each other. I thought this community was really neat because when I first started scrolling down their timeline, there was a man who asked for help in making a lesson plan fun for his 7th grade students. He said he was teaching about "bleeding Kansas" and was looking for ideas to make his lesson plan engaging and useful. Within a short period of time, someone responded by saying that he had taken his class on a field trip to Lawrence Kansas and shown them the downtown areas where Quantrill raided. He said that there was numerous places and spots that had a cool story about bleeding Kansas and that he was willing to help share those ideas with him. I learned from this guy that Quantrill stormed Lawrence during "bleeding Kansas" and killed hundreds of residence and burned down a part of their town.
Another Google+ Community I recommend is the "Teachers Helping Teachers" community. This is by far the best community I have found if you are looking for ideas or have questions about lesson plans. This site is full of teachers asking for help on a subject, and also teachers posting really cool ideas that worked great in their classroom. You can learn so much great material from this community. When looking through Teachers Helping Teachers, I learned from a teacher that theres a website about "role playing" in the classroom. She said that she has used games from this website and it has given her classroom much enthusiasm and excitement. She stated that these role playing games kept kids engaged and that she loved the participation of the students. She directed people to the website with all of the role playing activities. I thought that was so cool. Apparently that is a new trend in classrooms today, role playing activies and that is something cool that I had learned.