Web Community for Teachers

I started my search by just looking for sites with free lesson plans, and I stumbled upon teachers.net. It does have a bank of over four thousand lessons across the content areas for grades preschool through adult, but it has a wealth of other resources for teachers as well…

I looked through a number of the lesson plans on the site, and I would rate them as: decent. They’ve been submitted by teachers all over the United States (and some even internationally), so they don’t follow a consistent format. Not all of them are incredibly detailed, but they do provide ideas that could definitely serve as jumping off points for original lesson plans. Also you cannot search for lessons based on subject AND grade level, but rather one OR the other. It’s a little annoying to have to read through a long list to find what you’re looking for however, I would say this collection is still worth browsing through.

A more impressive part of this website is the chatboards. You can sift through the topics based on content area, grade level, or issue, and you can ask questions or provide advice to fellow teachers. I thought this section of the sight was organized really well, and I was surprised to see how active the conversations were. I read through one topic entitled “Extreme Behavior Problems;” it begged for help coping with five violent first grade students. The message was posted on Tuesday (3/2/10), and there are already six helpful answers available to the poster now (3/4/10). I thought this was pretty exciting – clearly educators are legitimately using this site to connect with and help one another.

In addition to these two resources, teachers.net also has a search engine for open education positions, Teacher.net Gazette (full of interesting articles and columns), project ideas, and fundraising opportunities. The website itself isn’t flashy or very professional looking, but I think that it offers some extremely valuable tools – most of which being the active teacher community.