Class Connect - Share, Find, and Connect on Lessons

Last week I was contacted by a nice young man and student named Eric Simons who was seeking some feedback on his new service. The service is called Class Connect.

The basic purpose of Class Connect is to provide a place for teachers to store all of the digital materials associated with their lesson plans. Teachers can store documents, images, video files, and websites (bookmarks). To help you keep your materials organized, Class Connect provides a tagging system. The tagging system allows you to use custom tags or assign Common Core standards tags from the standards menu. If you choose, you can share your materials with colleagues. Class Connect provides an option for collaboration on shared materials.

There is a community aspect to Class Connect. If you choose to, you can make your materials public so that they can be searched and viewed by other Class Connect users. There are two ways to search for lesson materials in Class Connect. You can search the shared materials by keyword or search by Common Core standard.

Applications for Education
By our good nature, teachers like to share. Class Connect makes it easy to share our best resources with each other. Sometimes it's by seeing what others have done to teach a topic that we get our best ideas for our own lessons. Maybe you are looking for a new way to teach a topic or need an idea to get your lesson plans started, have a search in Class Connect. And if you benefit from the sharing of others, return the Karma and share some of your own good resources.

Is Khan Inherently Crap?

@johnccarver @rmbyrne just cause something is mapped to the common core doesn't make it good. Increasingly ppl noting common core not so gr8
— Jerrid Kruse (@jerridkruse) March 4, 2012

@johnccarver @rmbyrne basically, stop spreading crap ;-). The crap being khan academy.
— Jerrid Kruse (@jerridkruse) March 4, 2012

These are two Tweets that Jerrid Kruse sent in reply to John Carver's reTweet of my post about Mastery Connect mapping Khan Academy videos to Common Core standards. Jerrid's comment reminded me of the similar sentiments shared by others in the educational technology community. I think that the majority of Khan's videos do serve the purpose of providing good, on demand tutorials. Yes, there are people who hold Khan up as the savior of education, he's not, and there are flaws with the flipped classroom model (assumption that students have access to the Internet at home being a major flaw with flipped classrooms), but does that mean that we shouldn't have students watch Khan videos? Please leave a comment below.

In the interest of telling more of the story, here are two follow-up Tweets from John and Jerrid.

@jerridkruse @rmbyrne Hey Sir,Kahn not the answer, just part of the discussion. It is a supplement, not a supplant
— John C. Carver (@johnccarver) March 4, 2012

@johnccarver @rmbyrne maybe in your & my eyes, but many (including khan) want to see it supplant - we need to be wary of hidden agendas, no?
— Jerrid Kruse (@jerridkruse) March 4, 2012

@jerridkruse correct, NOTHING will replace the human relationship in learning.
— John C. Carver (@johnccarver) March 4, 2012

@johnccarver amen, brother.
— Jerrid Kruse (@jerridkruse) March 4, 2012

For the record, I agree with John's comment, "Nothing will replace the human relationship in learning." I also think that John and Jerrid did a good job of keeping this conversation civil. Too often I see some of these conversations leave the realm of "polite" discourse and morph into something that isn't productive.

Khan Academy Videos Mapped to Common Core Standards

Disclosure: Mastery Connect is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.


Last month Mastery Connect added LearnZillion videos to the resources available in the Mastery Connect teachers' community. On Friday they added more videos in the form of Khan Academy videos. All of the videos from LearnZillion and Khan Academy are mapped to Common Core standards.

By request, here's a screenshot of how to find the videos once you've signed into your Mastery Connect account. Open the "common assessments" tab in Mastery Connect to see this screen.

Applications for Education
If you're looking for some videos that could help your students learn a concept that is a part of the Common Core standards that you have to teach to, the Mastery Connect community could be a great place to start your search.

LearnZillion Math Videos Now Available in Mastery Connect

Disclosure: Mastery Connect is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.

Among other things related to Common Core standards Mastery Connect hosts an active community of teachers who are sharing lesson ideas built around the Common Core standards. Now you can also find more than 300 LearnZillion videos in the Mastery Connect community. LearnZillion videos provide math lessons tied to Common Core standards for grades three through nine.

Applications for Education
If you would like to include a video element to your classroom lessons, take a look at the LearnZillion videos found in the Mastery Connect community. If you're not familiar with the Mastery Connect community, here are a few highlights: As a member of the community you can browse and download the materials shared by other educators. As a member of the community you can share your own materials. All materials found on Mastery Connect are tied to specific Common Core standards. You can also follow and have threaded Twitter-style discussions with other members of the community.