In terms of my website, I have had a most exciting week. It really opened my eyes to the possibilties for collaboration among teachers. I keep track of my site statistics, and I was so excited to see that two different school systems were accessing two of my online activities for students. One is a Romanticism project that I designed myself with the germ of an idea from an conference I went to about a year ago. The second is a Great Gatsby webquest that I almost complete lifted (with a few tweaks) from Valerie Arbizu. I am so excited to see 30 or 40 computers logged in at the same time, accessing these activities. That means to me that the teacher simply directed them to that URL. That means something I came up with was useful enough to another teacher that he/she simply assigned it.

I have also had the opportunity to feel helpful to a colleague in North Carolina. Waterfall and I talked on the phone last night about writing research papers. In fact, I need to e-mail her some documents I promised. I felt very excited about being useful. You may think that sounds silly, but sometimes, I think all teachers wonder if they’re being of any use to anybody.

This made me start thinking about the potential we have for sharing our expertise. We can seek out teachers in our own schools and we have the world opened to us through the WWW. It is a very exciting time to be teaching, I think. Suddenly the teachers’ lounge just got a whole lot bigger.