| Body | This activity was created to guide meetings related to the creation of a collaborative resource repository. These repositories are particularly useful in supporting vertical planning, horizontal planning, and planning among educators that teach less commonly taught languages.
Learning Outcomes:
Teachers will be able to:
- Create a system for organizing resources
- Share resources within the system
Materials: Resource Repositories Video
Procedure:
Before Meeting
- Form a professional learning community. This community can be departmental, by language learning level, and/or interdisciplinary.
First One-Hour Meeting
- As a team, watch the Resource Repositories video.
- Begin by deciding what resources you want to share. Brainstorm together in a shared space (e.g., on a whiteboard or in a digital space like a Google Jamboard). List as many as possible and then circle those resources that everyone agrees upon. In world language departments, these resources might include syllabi, lesson plans, assessments, or unit plans. In interdisciplinary teams, these resources might include cross-curricular projects, program-wide initiatives, and any critical programmatic documentation.
- As a team, decide how to organize the resources. Most teams will likely emplpy a two-tiered system (e.g., organized by unit first, and then by associated type of documentation).
- Select a digital platform to use to create the repository. This job can either be given to one person on the team or shared among multiple people working together. Some great organizational resources to check out include Google suite, Asana, and Trello.
- Create the structure of the repository as a group. Use your organizing principles (First One-hour Meeting, Step 3) to develop file folders or planning boards.
Second One-Hour Meeting
- Begin uploading materials to the platform. While this step is likely to take around an hour the first time the team engages with it, future meetings devoted to uploading should be much shorter (15-30 minutes should be expected if the team revisits this step regularly).
Ongoing
- Set aside one large (at least one hour) planning meeting a year to review what exists in the repository and to identify team goals for improving and or updating documents.
- Maintain regular meetings for uploading the materials to the repository.
Notes:
- Some professional learning communities may wish to focus on one resource at a time. For example, instead of brainstorming all possible resources (First One-Hour Meeting, Step 2), the members of the team may instead decide to collect only the most critical resources at that juncture.
- Try to incorporate repository planning and uploading efforts into regularly scheduled meetings. Department and other team meetings are a perfect venue to engage in this work while avoiding significant extra work for educators.
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