Many people in the field of education feel isolated, especially elementary teachers. This is because they are put in a classroom with a few marginal textbooks and told to teach. Teachers just starting out are left to either use the textbooks or reinvent the wheel for every lesson, which takes extraordinary amounts of time. The age of the internet has helped in both of those areas (for the teachers who use the internet that is). With the various chat rooms and list serves teachers can connect with other educators. In a building where there is only one new teacher it is even easier to feel isolated because the veterans are comfortable doing their own thing. Connecting with other teachers in similar circumstances is as easy as going on line. In those chat rooms teachers can share ideas and useful resources found on the web.
    The web is full of brilliant lesson plans and ideas to implement in the classroom, but sometimes these lessons aren't particularly suited for specific classes. Lessons can be changed to suit individual class needs. This brings up the point of intellectual property versus collaborative inquiry. I believe that to claim something as intellectual property can be dangerous. By saying a thought is yours and cannot be improved upon is crazy. Working as a team, collaborative inquiry,  provides far superior results. Everyone does not need to reinvent the wheel. Our energy is better spend making modifications and thus improvements to existing ideas, documents, etc.
    The internet has the potential to help teachers immensely if they use it. When someone else has started an idea it is often easier to adapt it than to come up with one independently. Education will benefit greatly from the internet because teachers will have more time to build on good ideas rather than coming up with everything on their own behind a closed classroom door. If people start looking at their ideas and thoughts as intellectual property education could suffer. It could force teachers back into a closed door with textbooks that could be characterized as less than stellar.