I am thrilled to have developed a relationship with a classmate of mine from the university that I attend. We call each other around once a week and talk about how our classes are going and discuss things that we have done, both good and bad. We also try to help each other out with ideas for lesson plans and such. It's a great feeling knowing that you helped someone else out of a jam for lesson planning, and it is great to have a resource that is just a phone call away when I get stuck.
A perfect example is a few weeks ago, I mentioned to him that one of my cooperating teachers had indicated to me that she would like to see me create most of the documents going forward for one of my classes. It was a pretty daunting feeling, but then he told me that he would copy all of the files from his high school for that subject and allow me to copy his flash drive. I couldn't believe his generosity and how lucky I am that he would share that with me.
Another excellent resource that I have is my brother. Our relationship is very similar to the one above, with the only exception being that we don't teach the same subject area. The good part is that he is an English teacher and I am always looking for ways to incorporate reading into my subject area. I believe that reading plays a very large role in instruction, no matter what subject you teach.
Last night, I was over at my brother's place catching up and I mentioned this project I am doing in one of my classes where the students pick a newspaper article out of the paper about the economy, summarize it and write about all of the different people who are affected by the article. He immediately told me about a graphic organizer that he uses at his school for someone very similar. So he emailed all of the different types of graphic organizers that his high school has and I was able to tweak one of them to fit my needs.
The other resource that I take advantage of is the Internet. It is amazing to me just how much great resources there are on the Internet. Also, with web 2.0 becoming more and more prevalent, I can only imagine the possibilities in the future. I am always trying to improve upon not only the links I have to resources, but also how I go about finding out about, collecting, and organizing those links. Once I am finished with student teaching, I am going to assemble a digital portfolio of myself, and one of the aspects that I want to include are my resources. I am ultimately looking to create a one-stop-shop for all things Business Education on the Internet. I am very impressed by pretty much everything that Dan Meyer does, but one thing in particular that I want to do is re-create when he posted all of his Math resources online, but only do that with my Business Ed resources. I am hoping to create a website(Maybe a blog) of some sort that I can upload all of my resources to, and so can everyone else. I have come across a number of website on the web that have plenty of resources, but none are directly orientated towards Business Ed teachers. The tricky part is going to be creating something online that becomes popular enough that a lot of people with know about, so they can contribute.
It's all about giving back and sharing....just like they taught us in kindergarten.
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