Thinkfinity.com

What is the tool?

Thinkfinity.com is a branch of Verizon’s Foundation literacy, technology, and technology projects. Thinkfinity.com partners with many content partners which help contribute and support the site. The major focuses of thinkfinity.com are to provide educational resources and professional development for educators and also students of all grade levels.


How can it be used?

Thinkfinity.com can be used in a variety of ways. The most popular way in which it is used is by teachers taking advantage of their 55,000 standards based lessons plans, student materials, interactive tools, and reference tools. All of thinkfinity.com’s tools are researched by leaders in the education profession in order to make sure of the viability in the classroom to which it is targeted.

Thinkfinity.com also provides professional development in order to help and train educators on ways to maximize the lessons found on their website. The foundation puts on many professional development sessions around the country as well as sessions which are entirely online.


What are the advantages and disadvantages of this tool?

I believe that there are many advantages to thinkfinity.com. This site provides teachers with lessons or lesson ideas which may be “outside the box” from what the teacher is used to doing in his or her classroom. I believe that there are times where teachers tend to fall back on lessons from pass years to present to their current classes. The problem with that attitude is that the world is always advancing and introducing new techniques and new ideas about most all of the information which needs to be presented to the students. With thinkfinity.com the educator has the opportunity to take ideas from others and also use their own ideas and mix and match them with the ideas and lessons from the website.

As for any disadvantages with this website; I can only see one which really comes to mind. Many of the lessons which are presented on thinkfinity.com’s website involve materials or even time which is simply not available to the teacher whom might be interested in using that particular lesson. As we all know, a lot of good ideas also entail more money or more expensive supplies which the school system just does not have available to the classroom teacher. I believe that this is a disadvantage of this site, but, with all things, the teacher should be able to mix and match some of their ideas with some of the lessons ideas to create enriching lessons which all will enjoy.


Who is the audience for this tool?

The audience for this tool, in the beginning, is educators. However, the students are the major beneficiary of the lessons on thinkfinity.com.


Where can we learn more about this tool?

http://thinkfinity.com www.marcopolosearch.org


What is your opinion on the usefulness of this tool?

I believe this tool is and can be very useful in today’s classroom .With all the new technology around us and more and more classrooms becoming more technological advanced, I believe that the lessons on this site will and can become a mainstay in many classrooms across this nation. As I stated earlier, the only disadvantage I immediately see with this site is the fact that some of the lessons will not be able to be used just because the materials or time is not there for the educator to properly implement the lesson. All in all, I believe that this is a very useful and well designed site and tool for educators of all grade levels.