Yesterday, I drove down to Dover to attend a Thinkfinity Field Trainer workshop. According to the Delaware Center for Educational Technology’s (DCET) website, “Thinkfinity.org is a partnership between the Verizon Foundation and the nation’s leading educational and literacy organizations. This web portal brings together over 55,000 free, standards-based resources including lesson plans, interactives, reviewed web links, and other materials in one easy-to-use site.”
These resources currently come from the following content partners (Smithsonian is the newest partner):
- American Association for the Advancement of Science
- Council for Economic Education
- International Reading Association
- National Center for Family Literacy
- National Council of Teachers of English
- National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
- National Endowment for the Humanities
- National Geographic Society
- ProLiteracy
- Smithsonian National Museum of American History
- The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
During my training yesterday, I became qualified to train other educators on how to use Thinkfinity. I’m excited to start sharing this information with educators in my school district and across the state of Delaware as not all of the District’s have Field Trainers yet. I’m especially excited to try using a hybrid training model that would combine person-to-person sessions and online collaboration using tools such as Blackboard. I was speaking with a friend last night who teaches in another school in my District and she suggested we offer some trainings together as she became a trainer last summer. I really like this idea because she is an academic teacher and I’m a vocational teacher so I think we could offer unique training experiences together.
