1. The best ways to manage the way we share our children's work with the communities is by using blogs, classroom websites, and through live videoconferencing through websites like Skype (November, 2010). Students can use blogs to share their thoughts, resources and ideas with other students and with the web community, and receive feedback and collaborate with their peers, or with other people around the world. Blogs also allows students to keep a sort of online portfolio of work that they've done over the years, which is useful for the students to look back on in years to come. Classroom websites are also a venue to share our student's work with the community. A teacher could post student work on the website, or post videos of presentations done in class so that they can be shared with parents and the community. A more technologically ambitious teacher might begin using a wiki class website such as wikispaces to set up their website (Richardson, 2010). Wiki websites allow students to edit the website, and can be managed by the teacher by only allowing those registered with the WIki site to edit the pages. Another tool is videoconferencing, like Skype. These videoconferencing websites can allow parents or anyone else interested to watch a presentation that their student is making live while the student is participating. Teachers must make their students aware of Cyber Ettiquette prior to setting up a wiki website or allowing students to blog. Teachers should also let the parents know that their students will be participating in the blog and wiki as well, so that they are aware of the benefits and risks of the websites.


2. Students can use the internet to get a first-hand view of complex issues such as globalization and cultural sensitivity by networking with experts, or first-hand witnesses to whatever they may be studying, to get a deeper mean in relation to a complex situation. For instance, Richardson (2010) talked about how a class was studying globalization, and was able to video conference with someone in the US who lost their job due to the effects of globalization, and another person in China who gained a job due to the effects of globalization. The teacher was able to give the students a first-hand account of the effects of globalization from people across the country. This is an example of a truly unique opportunity that the internet affords us as teachers. We can get in touch with anyone in the world to get a first-hand account on anything we are teacher. We can get in touch with experts, witnesses, victims, or just a class from across the world, to collaborate with and get information from on anything we are studying. Networking in this way with first-hand accounts on information being studied will give our students a more meaningful lesson, thus helping them retain the information and truly understand what's going on (hot cognition! (Goodman, 2008). However, it is always important that we as teachers verify that anyone we collaborate with or videoconference with is a legitimate source. We must also let our students know the risks involved with getting information from the internet, and what they can do to avoid retrieving false information.



3. The internet is providing a platform for teachers to collaborate as they never have been able to before. TEachers can collaborate through videoconferencing, and can share their ideas through such sites as wikiversity, which is a site that allows teachers to collaboratively author and edit the website within their content area. Such websites as www.4teachers.org are also education websites that allow teachers to write to each other, bounce ideas off each other, and share lessons or class projects that have been very useful for them that involve technology (November, 2010, P. 51). Another website that I discovered from one of my other professors, GNA, is slideshare.net. This website allows educators, or really anyone I guess, to upload various powerpoint presentations that they've created and share them with people. I thought that was a great idea and is very efficient for everyone in the education community - why create a powerpoint on a topic that was already made by someone else? There are also a number of forums available on education websites where people can post questions that someone else in the education community can answer for them. It sounds like the sky is the limit now for teacher collaboration!