Saturday 18 October 2014

my thoughts on readwritethink for aussie teachers




The American Scootle

ReadWriteThink is an american website that,much like the Australian Scootle, attempts to collate a wide variety of digital resources for teachers to use in the classroom, combining interactive resources, links to purchasable books and materials and lesson plans aligned to the US curriculum, ReadWriteThink in many ways accomplishes the ambitions set by the Australian Scootle, but with an alignment to the North American rather than Australian Curriculum.

Unlike Scootle however, ReadWriteThink is accessible to all teachers around the world and does not require a .gov or .edu sign-in to access, and so is available for Australian teachers to parse for resources.

Limitations  for Australian Teachers?
Any site that wishes to offer qualitative and peer reviewed resources aligned to a specific curriculum will necessarily suffer from a lack of resources and ReadWriteThink like Scootle currently suffers from this same problem. Whilst there are certain to be  useful lesson plans, interactive tools, and printouts that will be of use to teachers- the author of this article counted around 1190 resources available on ReadWriteThink in total- this includes all classroom resources, lesson plans and community stories (testimonials from teachers)- the vast majority of resources are lesson plans which will have to be appropriated to meet with Australian rather than American Curriculum standards.  


Verdict
Due to the small number of unique tools and resources offered by ReadWriteThink, particularly when one considers that Australian teachers will not be able to use many of these american resources due to localisation issues such as the US-centric themes of many lessons or the use of the imperial system for measuring; Teachers are more likely to use these teacher-resource sites like ReadWriteThink to parse for exercises and resources occasionally then to become regular users of the site as is intended, fortunately ireadwrite think features a powerful search and category browsing features that make this task easy to perform and is accessible by all teachers which boosts its usability and usefulness.  

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