smartDESKTOP

I am going to review smartDESKTOP, a website I discovered while in my last EDTEC class. It was a great site to visit and I would recommend this site to teachers and administrators alike. Our teachers collaborate weekly by grade level and 5 times a year, cross grade level. We have the capability at my school to view webpages on a large screen via an LCD projector. smartDESKTOP is a great tool to use to coordinate lesson plans because the teachers can plan the basic lessons together. My goal is to have everyone in the grade level working toward the same goal and I believe this website is a great way to do that.

The website is http://www.smarddesktop.org The site has free accounts for users.

smartDESKTOP helps you to plan for classes short or long range. When I was on the site this summer I planned for a reading intervention class (long range). I love this site because it helps teachers stay focused on the long range goal: increased student achievement.

The monthly view gives the user a quick glimpse of the classes that were planned. For me this was a much more comprehensive view of what I was teaching for that month. It is much easier to make modifications to the classes when looking at the monthly view. Teachers, during collaboration, can make modifications to their lessons together.

One feature that is crucial for teachers is SMARTNOTE. This allows the user to make any notes pertinent to the class. There can be more than one SMARTNOTE on a day. For teachers (or administrators) who make constant notes as they sit at the computer, this is an invaluable tool. I am constantly making notes and it is much easier for me to type rather than to write notes on little pieces of paper and forgetting where they are. This is also great for teachers when they collaborate. They may have individual ideas that need to be jotted down and referred to later.

The Long Plan allows the user to type in the objectives, overview, modifications and materials and assessments needed for the lesson. This is everything I would expect a teacher to have in their lesson plans.

The standards feature is probably my favorite feature of this website. It allows you to select the standard for the subject, grade level and indicators for your lessons. The resources feature was not one of my favorite ones because of loading things onto the website from the teachers' own computer. This might lead to some copyright issues. It might be something the user might want to use with caution.

Other features of smartDESKTOP are: calendar, instruction, curriculum, assessment, collaborations, communities, reports and tools. I would recomend this site for schools to use with their teachers.


National Educational Technology Standards for Students

I consider my teachers my students also, so I felt the following standard applied to them.

Communication and Collaboration
Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others. Students:
a. interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts or others employing a variety of digital
environments and media.
b. communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats.
c. develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures.
d. contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems.