by Jon Pennington (Guest Blogger)

Dana Ishii, Master’s student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa uses Google Calendar to offer an innovative solution to a teacher’s common problem. Her use of this tool as a “perpetual lesson planner” is the kind of development that encourages teachers to collaborate online for the clear purpose of improving the efficiency of their practice. With the same lessons being repeated each year by different teachers, around the same time of year, this solution is practical by providing a shared organizational system that saves teachers the time of remembering what they did last year and digging up that old assignment. Dana created an online training module to provide guidance and resources for teachers using Google Calendar as a collaborative lesson planner. This site was purposively designed to offer an effective teaching module that engages all learners. Her website is also a place that provides relevant insight into a previously untested system. With these considerations, Dana conducted usability tests on her website to determine how well it functioned for her intended purposes. She shares her methodology and reminds us of the power of living in beta- trying new things, not being afraid to fail and improving what you are doing as you go along.   Dana’s session was interesting and inspiring. One useful area for future research on this topic would be an evaluation of Google Calendar as a tool for collaborative lesson planning. This may provide insight into how to improve the use of the tool for this process.

Dana Ishii Contact Information:

Twitter: @danaishii  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dana.ishii.5