Beyond Textbook

The video How Teachers Collaborate Online and in School talks about an online collaborative wiki called Beyond the textbook. This internet application gathers resources, ideas and LESs that can help teachers of different school districts to plan their teaching. This website offers information about different strategies or techniques to use in order to teach different concepts. A sense of collectiveness can also be developed since students know that they learn the same things as others do. Teachers can interact and discuss about what is posted on the wiki, experiment the LESs and then give their comments and suggest improvements to do. Teachers can share their creations with their colleagues, but they can also extend their knowledge beyond the classroom and even the school. The opportunity to share ideas, resources and LESs with people of other districts and people around the world is possible since the digital make it more efficient. It creates some sort of community among teachers and students who participate in the collaborative wiki. 

I think that the use of wikis to promote collaboration among teachers is an excellent idea. It offers the opportunity to share ideas, resources and comments about many aspect of teaching while reducing the workload of everyone who participates in the exchange. As seen in our readings, Kovacic and al. talk about the Hotlist as an e-tivity, which I think can be a good start to a given project. Gathering hyperlinks and resources that can be applied to a further projects is a good way to begin a topic with students or even teachers. Moreover, Paul Sze expresses that wikis must be meaningful and interesting for students. I think it is the same thing concerning ESL teachers. Topics must be challenging to deal with in order to help teachers transferring their passion and their knowledge to the students. From my point of view, it is the best way to motivate students to participate. Wikis are great tools for collaborative writing among teachers and students!