Community place for teachers

Online forums and communities are a good place to get tips, ideas, and news about specific topics. Like bloggers have many forums from which they can get useful information while getting a chance to discuss or share their own experiences. There is a lot of learn at these social community places.

'The apple' is for teachers, which is itself created by a teacher. It brings members of the education community together to support and advance the profession.

You get news, search for lesson plans and read articles written by experts, as well as getting career based posts.
Membership is free for all.

Few post links are given to show the content you can read at the site:

- Classroom Discipline Tips: Dealing with Difficult Students & Parents

- Top 10 Technology Tips for New Teachers

Get in touch with your community at - 'twitter for teachers'

'twitter' is the name of new micro blogging way of getting in contact with each other. This social community site has broken the many records of other social networking sites. I have also realized the power and effectiveness of 'twitter' and after joining it I noticed that I can get in touch with other online bloggers or people having same interests and moreover it is the best way to know 'what you are doing?' in few lines. You just scan your profile page and read or go to the tweets or links which you have bookmarked or followed.

Many teachers have their accounts at 'twitter' and if you are interested to get connected to them, simply go to 'twellow' and search of 'teachers' or similar category. 'twellow' is the yellow pages of 'twitter'. You can edit your profile for 'twitter' with the help of 'twellow'.

Link to my page at 'twellow'

Second best place to find the educators or educational stuff is to sign in for 'twitter for teachers'.

Link to the site: http://twitter4teachers.pbwiki.com/

This wiki was created to easily help educators find other educators on Twitter that have the same interests as them (that teach in the same content area).

Check out the list of educators on the pages linked there and add your Twitter name to the appropriate list too. You can browse through the subject or area if you need to look for other educators.

Join the Social Network For Learning - 'ePals'

ePals is a community of connected classrooms, which is equally beneficial for students and teachers.

It is fastest growing K-12 online community for meaningful learning. More than half a million educators and millions of learners across 200 countries and territories safely connect, collaborate and build community.

It offers classroom e-mail, blogs, online literacy tools and Web-based collaborative projects on subjects like global warming and habitats.

EPals says 125,000 classrooms around the world are using at least some of its free tools, reaching 13 million students, and its ambition is to become a global “learning social network.”

What you can do at ePals:

1- Collaborate with another classroom
2- Find great projects and instructional materials at ePals
3- Chat with other teachers
4- Share your successful lessons and resources
5- Connect Your Families
6- Have a say! Cast a vote in the Polls
7- Connect with Email
8- Protect your students with Monitored Accounts
9- Create a Blog - We want to hear what you have to say
10-Ask an ePals Teacher

There are many forums where teachers or students where you can ask questions, read the other member's opinions and place comments.

I could see many posts which are about learning a foreign language. Especially for the people who learn English as a second language

Click on the "support" link to see what you can get from ePals and how to start discovering what ePal is.

Teachers and schools can now create blog at ePal.

"ePals is now making SchoolBlog available at no cost to schools, districts, and learners globally. ePal wants to partner with the education community to speed the rate of safe and collaborative learning around the world.

Get parent's advice and tips at "Minti"

There are a lot of message boards or forums for parents but "minti" is different in this sense that it is for parents and from the parents.
This is a social community, where parents can share and gain valuable advice. minti is about advice, friendship and community for parents.

Mainly the site contains articles about parenting and topics range from pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, babies, early childhood, schooling, tweens, teenage years and beyond.
It all started in 2005, by Rachel Cook, who was inspired by "wikipedia" and felt the need for "parent to parent advice-opedia"

The story behind the creation of this site is interesting:

What prompted the creation of Minti?

"When becoming a mother for the first time, Co-Founder, Rachel Cook discovered motherhood was actually about trial and error. She sought ways of finding information to alleviate the downsides of this method. She discovered how little concise, detailed information was available to be passed down from experienced mothers and fathers, particularly on what methods worked and what didn't, in bringing up children. Gaining this tried and proven advice was a constant challenge. The really good advice appeared to be spread via word of mouth or on an ad-hoc basis. There was not enough advice and experience captured to choose alternatives from and it was tough to get the 'good advice' spread around the world to other parents.

Rachel researched the space for over more than a year and discovered that a single place where concise, clear advice and experiences from parents and targeted at the modern parent was lacking. The industry 'appeared' to be fragmented and she found mounting evidence of an influx of parents requiring more depth and understanding to the advice. Magazine articles and books were great sources of information but they could not be thoroughly discussed and expanded on. In many situations where serious help was required only those families with high disposable incomes could gain access to expert 'hands on' advice implemented in the home.

If this was the situation in Perth, Western Australia, then what was it like in the world's biggest economy, the U.S. Rachel searched for a site that offered parenting advice "first hand" from parents but could not find one that solved the problem without excessive advertising, "experts" rather than real parents and difficult to search information.

The desire to create a place for parents to share advice on a global footing fuelled the vision to pull a team together to make Minti happen."
Their mission is to create a “the world’s largest parent to parent advice-opedia”.
What site offers?

- Over 4000 parenting advice articles.
- Advice powered by parents, not corporations
- Over 600 interest groups to join
- Free profile page with blog and photo storage
- Membership is FREE

For fresh news and posts:
- minti blog
- The parenting advice page provides advice written by parents, for parents and ranked according to how useful it is.

Sign up at register page and after becoming member you can also write articles about your parent experiences.