Mrs A's Blog

My Rambling Thoughts on Teaching and Learning

To Share or Not To Share? Is it really a question?

3D Character and Question Mark
Image by 姒儿喵喵 via Flickr

I have been teaching for 6 years plus my 7 years of study (yes I know I took my time!) and during this time I have created many resources.  During my second year of uni as I stayed up late one evening trying to find a better way to teach an economic concept as every uni student does I turned to Mr Google.  I was struggling and I figured that many teachers before me had taught this concept I should be able to find something.  Did I find it?  You guessed it I found nothing.

Why as teachers do we constantly reinvent the wheel?  Why when we all teach from similar syllabi’s and courses do we not share our resources?  How much time would we save?

Ever since my evening with Mr Google I have openly shared my resources figuring that what goes round must come round and the resources will eventually be shared back with me.  It has  taken 10 years for something to return.  When I first started teaching in the classroom other teachers didn’t understand why I was sharing my hard work.  Why was I making them look better by doing all the work?  My response was quite simply we are all teaching the same skills and content why are we wasting precious time creating the same resources?  Slowly my colleagues have come around.

Over the last few years with the take off of PLNs through platforms like Facebook and Twitter the sharing has become prolific.  You find something useful you share it.  So why are some educators still too scared to share?

In the age of social networking and content creation (Web 2.0) there is no question.  Everything we create as educators should be shared no matter how small or insignificant we think it is.

The answer is To Share.

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1 comment

  1. And then there are those who expect to be referenced when they see their lesson plans pop up in someone else’s classroom – like teaching is some sort of academic essay! (This was one tutor I had at Uni and even then I was disgusted with her sentiment!)

    I have given away so many of my collected resources and I love to think people out there are using them – it doesn’t matter if they remember it was me that made them, it’s still a good feeling!

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