I haven’t done much with Google Wave yet. I must confess, I don’t find it all that user-friendly, but I think in time it will proably become smoother to use (and I’ll get the hang of it, too). But I’ve read various good things about its use in collaborative projects, and I wondered if maybe its time has come in Scottish education.
A common complaint about A Curriculum For Excellence is that we simply don’t have enough time to develop schemes of work and resources for it. I’ve heard some teachers wish that there was some central development work going on so we could just get handed resources, rather than each school reinventing the wheel. I think a happy medium lies somewhere between these two extremes – after all, aCfE is supposed to allow individual teachers greater freedom, so being handed down a pre-written course from On High doesn’t make much sense from that point of view. On the other hand, there’s not much point in all schools covering the same development ground.
I wonder if Wave could be put to good use in developing new CfE resources? If there were a Wave for each subject area, for instance, and interested teachers could join the Wave and use it to develop schemes of work, activities and so on. I’m not sure how cross-curricular links would fit into this (as I said, I’m no Wave expert).
Is it worth exploring? Is someone already doing it? How could it work? All ideas welcome!
