7 Texas Districts Share Interactive Sites with Teachers

In 2001, Pasadena Independent School District brought computers and Internet access into its Texas classrooms for the first time. The teachers knew they could find education resources online, but didn't know what was out there.

The technology staff members didn't know either, but they decided to find out.

They wanted to come up with a way to share good websites with teachers — that's when they started the website SAILOn, which stands for Subject Area Interactive Lessons On-line. 

“It was just a project more or less for our own district just to help our teachers with it," said Tom Deibel, an instructional specialist. "Then we found out that other districts in the area were kind of doing the same thing, so we said 'Why should each district reinvent the wheel?'”

Fast forward nine years: Now seven technology teams at districts in the Houston area work together to help teachers mix interactive online resources into their instruction. They save teachers time by searching for sites and organizing them by subject, grade level and state standard.

“A lot of different people from a lot of different places seem to be using our stuff,” Deibel said. "And even though it’s tied to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, I mean, the same concepts are being taught everywhere.”

About four times a year, the district teams meet to discuss the sites they've found. Those teams come from Pasadena, Deer Park, Pearland, Dickinson, Brazosport, Clear Creek and Santa Fe independent school districts.

In Pearland Independent School District, the technology staff uses SAILOn during interactive whiteboard and slate training. Instead of learning the "busy" software program that comes with them right away, teachers can pull up an interactive site on their whiteboard and start teaching with it immediately, said Emily Bourgeois, a Pearland instructional technology coordinator who helped Deibel launch SAILOn.

If teachers have enough computers in their classrooms, they can split 30 kids into three or four groups. One can work independently on educational game sites, another can work with manipulatives on the floor, and a third one can listen to teacher instruction. This works particularly well in elementary classrooms where they do have stations.

“It gives the teacher another outlet in a sense, another method of getting her students involved while they’re still having fun,” Bourgeois said.

Teachers don't have time to search for fun, entertaining educational sites, and districts inherently don't have enough money to pay subscription fees for interactive sites. SAILOn saves them both time and money.

“This just does all of that preliminary work for them," Bourgeois said, "and it allows them to go directly to a spot and find something that they know or can pretty much anticipate works very well with the subject matter that they’re teaching, and so I think that helps them in the long-run.”