Google Groups

While Google Groups is a good idea for bringing a group of students together and encouraging interaction with students, teachers and parents, there are a number of problems with it. In order to be a member of a Google Group, you are required to have a Gmail account. Since many people do not have Gmail as their main email address, they would have to create one in order to be a part of it. Many parents would most likely decide against having to memorize another password, and simply opt out of having that connection tool to the teacher.

This also creates a problem if students are required to do any projects or homework through the Google Group. As in my case, I have been having problems becoming a member of the group, and therefore have been unable to edit my assigned section for the project. These kinds of problems are frequent with internet based homework assignments, so at this moment they are more bothersome than helpful for most classes (most commonly, math classes will assign online homework and the websites with the homework often crash or have problems).

Content Exploration

I reviewed the Inspiration software for Secondary English Education. It is a great software that helps students form organizations skills in writing and visualize concepts and relationships. There are also a number of tools for teachers to customize Inspiration to work with their curriculum. Inspiration even comes with easy to understand training videos that help everyone get started efficiently.

This literary analysis of the story The Cay is a great example of how students can use Inspiration to enhance their understanding of stories and plots. Also, depending on the student's preferred learning style, they can either view the analysis in either a diagram mode (with pictures and brief descriptions), or as an outline.

While this software is mostly focused on student retention and understanding of the material (and would be consdered a reference tool), there are books available for teachers that help create lesson plans using Inspiration. The books acts as a tutorial for the teacher by providing an overview and review questions over the information. Here is the sample tutorial.