One of the foundations of innovation that is vibrant in the math department where I teach is the idea of embracing an open culture. We share resources with in our department using Google Drive daily with the hopes of aligning each section of the same course. This has been happening for about three years now spurred by two merging events. The first was that I pushed to migrate all of our documents from the school hosted network drive, which could only be accessed if you were in the school or connected through a VPN because I found the process archaic and disorganized and the second was that we were redesigning our math curriculum in such a way where we ousted textbooks and had to create all of our materials.
Since moving to Google Drive we’ve found that not only it is much easier to share and adapt each other’s creations, we can share our curriculum out in the world. While the process isn’t as open as some (there are tests, quizzes and other documents that should remain confidential) we share our materials with the middle schools that send students to us, and those who are just curious about what we are doing.
In the future, I would like to create a website that houses all of the relevant materials a student would need for a class. My hopes in doing this is to be able to share our materials more freely, organize and cull out resources that are unnecessary, and potentially even move in the direction of creating an online course where students could progress through our math program at a pace that is tailored to their needs.
Bob Loblaw Law Blog 
Kristine,
This is an amazing way to connect both the colleagues within your math department, but also with the middle schools that you receive your students from. I know that a struggle that many high schools face is the struggle with integrating students from multiple sending schools. By sharing what it is you do in class the middle school teachers can expose students to the style of work they will get and help make the transition less stressful for students and also let the teachers know what skills you expect students to have when they get to your class. This seems like a great way to ensure better communication of expectations and classroom content between grades spanning different grades,schools, and buildings. Great work, and thank you for sharing, I am sure to pass this idea along to the teachers in my school!
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Yes, please do!
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This is a great idea to connect the department! Google Drive is a great tool! Out of curiosity, do you find yourself using any other Google based tools?
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I use all of the google tools I can get my hands on, except for classroom.
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