Generation Linked

Ringwood, Jessica

Cook, M., & Cassidy, C. (2011). Generation linked. Teacher Librarian: 38(5), 27-30.

Summary: This article enforces the benefits of collaboration between classroom teachers and school librarians by describing one such project undertaken by a media specialist and a language arts teacher at a middle school in New Jersey.  The teachers aligned their research project to state standards and incorporated the use of both the Livebinder technology and SCAN, an online interactive discussion tool.

Evaluation: I wanted to read about a successful example of collaboration and learn about some of the specific online tools they used in the hopes that I could incorporate these tools into one of the Transformation projects.  I was surprised that the co-teachers in this project had such high success rates: more students turned in their work and more students scored higher on the essay they had to write.  I also noticed that the way collaborating and co-teaching is described in the article is not exactly what we are asked to aim for in our class lesson plans.  Finally, I would be interested in reading about future collaboration experiments that the same pair of instructors works on together.  I am curious to learn about what they discover over time.