Tapped In

The Tapped-In website was an incredible resource over the course of the spring semester. For me, the biggest advantage of the Tapped-In resource was a large pool of mentors who had experienced many of the same things, that we as student teachers, were experiencing over the semester. These teachers could give us examples of how they dealt with similar situations, or advice, or point us in the direction of a vast number of resources. At one point in the semester, I went through all of the discussion boards and copied down all the links, and there were over ten pages of links that had been posted. Many of these were great resources, that I doubt we could have found on our own. The constant encouragement from our mentors was also greatly appreciated. Whenever one of us felt that we were never going to survive in the classroom, there were always plenty of positive voices coming from all across the world. Another advantage of the Tapped-In website was that the students could discuss how different situations were dealt with in their practicum classrooms. Many of these issues are important, but because of the WM scheduling, we had very little time in any of our education classes to discuss things that did not relate directly to the course material. It also gave us a perspective of what our classmates were doing in their practicum classrooms and their views on a number of subjects. Although it was incredibly useful, it did have a few disadvantages as well. Not everyone checked the site on a regular basis and often conversations would be repeated or go through long periods with no comment before being picked up again. Also, topics would be originated in different threads and you would either have to post in both of them to make the same point, or the people who only read one thread wouldn't get a true account of everyone's input. Overall though Tapped-In was a valuable resource and I think it would be beneficial for each school to have a forum for parents and teachers to discuss school matters.