For our final ECMP 355 Project, Katie, Amy and I wanted to create something that would be useful to us in the future. After bouncing around a few different ideas, we settled on creating a Wiki for Business Educators. We call this Wiki The Business Education Toolbox.
We decided to create this Wiki for a couple of reasons. First, business education resources are not normally as prevalent or easily found as some for other more commonly taught subjects. We sometimes find ourselves searching for hours for just the right resource. So we hope that this toolbox will not only save ourselves time in the future, but also that other business educators that join the Wiki. We hope we can generate enough interest in this Wiki so that Business Educators can become members, and share their resources with the rest of the members.
A second reason is that ‘Teaching is Sharing!’. Why reinvent the wheel? When starting a lesson plan from scratch, why not see what has been done previously? Or see what resources are recommended by others and build your lesson plan from there?
While there have been other business education wikis created previously, none of them seem to have been kept current or have very many members. It is our goal to continue to add to this wiki and continue to promote it. The more members we have, the faster we will build this wonderful toolbox and the more useful it will become!
This was my first time creating a wiki and it was fairly straightforward. From the beginning, I would have loved to change the look of the wiki. I find the current format fairly boring. But it is the only free template available. So I need to let go of the terrible visual aspect of the wiki.
Besides the visual aspect, the wiki was very simple to create. However, it was compiling and organizing all the information we had to add that was the biggest challenge. I believe though that we were able to do this successfully and the final product is quite well organized.
The pages we decided to include in the wiki are: lesson plans, unit plans, resources, technology, promotions and blogs.
The lesson plans page includes all the lesson plans we, and a few other classmates have completed for our EBUS courses in the past. The unit plans page includes the same, save for unit plans instead of lesson plans (clearly!). The resources page includes links to resources we have found for bus ed courses in the past. These first three pages are arranged by subject for ease of use, and the titles of the subjects on the lesson plans page are linked to the Saskatchewan Curriculum.
The technology page includes many links to the wonderful technologies that we have learned about in ECMP 355 or that we have found on our own. The promotions page includes some materials that we have produced for our EBUS course to promote EBUS in high schools. Katie and Amy created an amazingly powerful video for this purpose. Finally, the blogs page includes links to business educator blogs and/or education blogs that we have found to be interesting or useful during the past semester.
Enjoy! And tell your friends! 🙂
Jennifer Thomas' Portfolio and Blog 