What a wonderful video of your sub lesson plan:

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Your video demonstrates all of the key ingredients you have been advocating for, from effective Keynote/Powerpoint techniques, to engaging and interesting questions and visuals (both math and non-math), to your light, humorous, yet respectful speaking style.

Making video lesson plans can have so many good uses…From students watching them over and over again, to other teachers picking up ideas, to potential teachers like me learning how to give effective presentations and how to connect to students.

Your video is worth a lot more than a thousand words!

Philip

And don’t even get me started on the Ning/Twitter effect. There are times when I feel that huge swaths of the educational blogosphere are crows running after shiny things.

RE: “There are technologies well suited to organizing all this stuff – web ontologies and the like – but essentially, developing that stuff is nobody’s job, or job description, so it is unclear how it would ever happen” — absolutely. And that is why, in the face of that reality, using the blog as a container is a decent starting point — simple enough for most people to use, and flexible enough to hold whatever we throw at it. Most decent blogging software also supports at least rudimentary metadata (very rudimentary, in the form of tags), which should be enough to get things started.

@ Dan — RE: “After posting a lesson here, I want to head to a site, input my trackback URI into a field, add some tags, checkboxes for recommended grade level, etc., and then add it to the index.” — This is very achievable as an add-on to the site I created over the last couple days. This would simply be a form with fields for a URI, description, and some taxonomy categories (for the checkboxes).

This functionality, combined with aggregating selected feeds (and possibly some code in the background to automatically prune imported blog posts on specifically defined conditions) would be a good first pass at the “Flickr of lesson sites” —

I also think that some similar filtering could be accomplished by community-applied tags, and a user ratings system that would bury less relevant content.

RE: “(Except, of course, because no one’s raising a hand to code the thing?)” — while I can’t drop everything and immediately put development hours into perfecting this, I am more than willing to put the time into spec’ing a prototype and, where possible, bootstrapping either our internal dev work or development that is released back into the Drupal community into improving the site.

So, consider my hand raised. From the comments in this thread, it seems like there are a few other folks with development chops as well. I also think that a site like this, developed as a project used for Open Educational Resources, running on Open Standards, and powered by Open Source code, could actually attract additional development funding once we had a solid proof of concept.

The key is a tool that is simple to use, leverages existing work by educators without placing an additional burden on educators, and supports involvement within the community at a variety of levels — from the passive content browser, to the commentor/rater, to the lesson-blogger, to the lesson-developer, to the site maintainer.

Which, as I said earlier, we pretty much have now.

Cheers,

Bill

“Time” is a timeless constraint and will always discourage well-meaning bloggers from posting resources. But even if a blogger had the time and the notion (which I do) the largest storage mediums around right now (these depots) impose too many constraints on creativity. Mandatory fields, file formats, and formatting. Because of server space and bandwidth constraints Graphing Stories would never have happened at ILoveMath. Which is totally fair.

But what we need then is a Flickr for lesson planning, a site which imposes no constraints on content (no mandatory fields, radio buttons, file formats, or sizes) but which encourages indexing and tagging.

After posting a lesson here, I want to head to a site, input my trackback URI into a field, add some tags, checkboxes for recommended grade level, etc., and then add it to the index.

This works well for sites reliant on user-generated content like YouTube and Flickr. Why not lesson plans?

(Except, of course, because no one’s raising a hand to code the thing?)

It was crazy.

Now with the wiki, a shared lab is posted once and then anyone else can download it whenever. Check it out:
http://prettygoodphysics.wikispaces.com/

Ahhhhh…. (I swear my housemate must think I’m crazy for all the noises I’m making at my computer right now.)

I was using the wrong search function. (And even with your description, it took me a while to get over the search at the top of every page as the “second” search.) Your site just got so much better for me. Though now I need to remind myself to come up with tomorrow’s quiz questions rather than search for things that are already over for the year.

To H: I’ll join you in the day or two in a coffee shop over break to get some of my two cents out there. Though, despite everyone’s encouragement, I may focus on developing stories without my materials for now. Because while imperfect starting places are something, I can give links to the places that I stole from.

Technically, lesson plans are difficult. They’re semi-structured data. Some are very free-format, some are highly organized, and there is huge variety in the design and intent of the structures that are used. There are technologies well suited to organizing all this stuff — web ontologies and the like — but essentially, developing that stuff is nobody’s job, or job description, so it is unclear how it would ever happen, and since only a tiny, tiny handful of people understand the real issues… well, it is pretty hopeless to do it *right*.

I’d say blogging, and linking to good stuff in other people’s blogs is the right way to go, in part because that method leverages Google most effectively, and it just avoids the hopeless technical terrain.

Also, I think Lesson Study is a good model and quite relevant to this issue, which I keep trying to pimp to the blogosphere, to no avail. Here’s a good place to start on that if you’re curious: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Flessonresearch.net%2Faera2000.pdf&ei=VClnR8X4OZ2GeoKlyUs&usg=AFQjCNGXa1oBQ1gglvKoEJeJSYgXOsx5rw&sig2=wHscaoECmh62rgBWh1J1yg

To H… I do appreciate that you are using ILoveMath. I freely support and share whatever I can. I have always vowed that any website that I own will be 100% free to users and 100% ad-free. The site only grows because of the membership. I am so grateful that you found materials there that were useful to you. I have not had much time to work on it lately because I’ve been totally revamping my Geometry curriculum due to the new state End of Instruction exam and trying to support the Collaboration of teachers at my site (for anyone interested in seeing how I share and support the teachers at my site, please visit http://jenkscollab.math911.net/). Each chapter, I try to search the web for the absolute best resources for teachers to use in the classroom. The purpose is to save them time so they can spend the time on creative lessons. I also use the site to help with Best Practices, although I’ve gotten a bit lax on that *shame on me*.

Anyway, the point of this very long comment is that you are all more than welcome to post anything you wish to post at ILoveMath. If there are certain file extensions that you need, let me know – only the most common are currently in my list because those are the ones that I use most often.

Thanks for your continued support – I’m sorry this sounds like an ad, because I rarely spread the word that I am the person behind the server :)