Week 4 Reflection-Presentation Tool

Time is and always has been a precious commodity in the field of education. These days however, an educator’s time is chock full of new interventions, programs, trainings and meetings. Although these meetings are ideally relevant and important, they can still take away from the time that teachers have to plan, grade, analyze, and discuss. In order to continue to improve and learn new strategies, teachers need not only programs and meetings, but also chances for collegial discourse. When given the time, teachers relish the opportunity to share best practices, talk about new strategies and interventions and much more. Although required meetings and trainings are often embedded with opportunities for teachers to talk, it is difficult to engage in in-depth sharing when given only a few minutes.

This is where GoogleDocs comes into play. This web based program allows users to post documents and materials for others to share. The program would be ideal for sharing of lesson plans, documentation of meetings, interventions, etc. Teachers could add, delete, share and edit documents with one another. Users are able to choose who can see posted documents. One downside of this program could potentially be that as a leader, you would need to be cautious of what is documented and shared about students and teachers.

I believe that the pros of this program outweigh the cons. Content specialists could monitor the planning or assessments of their department. This tool would allow school administrators “to ensure the integration of appropriate technologies in instruction and learning environments to maximize student achievement,” which is the 2nd Maryland Technology Standard for School Administrators.