A seemingly simple question – Follow-up

Neither Todd Seal nor Dan Meyer agree with my assertion that teachers should be able to identify at least 10 good web sites for their classes. Todd says:

I’m typically looking for lesson plan ideas, handouts, and audio/video resources. What I’m finding are half-baked thoughts, poorly articulated assessment, and soft lessons that only barely cover the material I want to cover.

Todd and Dan are both reflective, innovative educators, so I’ll take them at their word and say that perhaps I overestimated the quality, if not quantity, of the online resources available to K-12 teachers. If so, this paucity of high quality online resources for educators is pretty sad given the longevity and history of the Internet as well as the ability of any educator to now easily have an online presence [Dan, yes, I’d include blogs and other teacher expressive channels in that general category of ‘web sites’].

I’m not really concerned about teachers like Todd and Dan that at least have looked around the Web and made the pedagogical decision that most of what’s out there is crap. I’m concerned about the ones that haven’t even looked.

Todd challenged me to come up with 10 good sites for one of my educational leadership courses. I’ll have to chew on that a bit. There aren’t as many folks creating resources for administrators as for teachers, but I think I can do it…