With a year of blogging behind me, it is a good time to think about how I use it, and how I find it valuable as a teacher.
Some of the blogs I write are about something new I've learned (usually tech) which I want to share with the world. I think of these as the most useful, even though it is often information that can be found a million places on the web. They have been curated by me, and I'm not a bad curator of tech.
Other times I blog about lessons I have taught or about questions I have as I plan for a lesson. These are mainly to fulfill the program blogging requirement. In blogging I am just recording the thoughts I've had, but the blogging itself does not advance my thinking, and my questions are mostly ones that can only be answered with classroom experience.
I wish I blogged about ideas I had read about, or ah-ha moments of making connections, but I don't. I've read most of the readings for coursework, and many outside, as well as doing the assignments, but I don't feel I've had the time/space/experience to synthesize the information, and so no blogs like this from me yet.
I have imagined sharing great lesson plans in the future through a blog. But though I occasionally look for lesson plans online for ideas, I find myself agreeing with Spencer from A Sustainable Start that great lesson plans are great because of the context of students in which you teach them, and don't necessarily translate their greatness to another class.
I have tried to follow several blogs outside the cohort, but I find my interest uneven. I may have started following a blog because of a particular post, but then find the subsequent ones don't match my interests.
Which brings me to twitter.
I am recently convinced on the helpfulness of twitter. My ah-ha moment with twitter was setting up Tweetdeck and Hootsuite columns to report particular hashtags. The hashtags I set up do consistently reflect my interests, and from them I get to blog posts and other resources that I want to read.
As to my contributing to the conversation in the cloud, and not just taking from it, I feel that I do not yet have much to add to it. I understand the tools now, and with a little more experience and a little more synthesis time, I will have more to give back.
This quarter a lot of my posts were about teaching math, and I also commented on other cohort blogs about math and/or exit tickets. For example, here and here.
Some of the blogs I write are about something new I've learned (usually tech) which I want to share with the world. I think of these as the most useful, even though it is often information that can be found a million places on the web. They have been curated by me, and I'm not a bad curator of tech.
Other times I blog about lessons I have taught or about questions I have as I plan for a lesson. These are mainly to fulfill the program blogging requirement. In blogging I am just recording the thoughts I've had, but the blogging itself does not advance my thinking, and my questions are mostly ones that can only be answered with classroom experience.
I wish I blogged about ideas I had read about, or ah-ha moments of making connections, but I don't. I've read most of the readings for coursework, and many outside, as well as doing the assignments, but I don't feel I've had the time/space/experience to synthesize the information, and so no blogs like this from me yet.
I have imagined sharing great lesson plans in the future through a blog. But though I occasionally look for lesson plans online for ideas, I find myself agreeing with Spencer from A Sustainable Start that great lesson plans are great because of the context of students in which you teach them, and don't necessarily translate their greatness to another class.
I have tried to follow several blogs outside the cohort, but I find my interest uneven. I may have started following a blog because of a particular post, but then find the subsequent ones don't match my interests.
Which brings me to twitter.
I am recently convinced on the helpfulness of twitter. My ah-ha moment with twitter was setting up Tweetdeck and Hootsuite columns to report particular hashtags. The hashtags I set up do consistently reflect my interests, and from them I get to blog posts and other resources that I want to read.
As to my contributing to the conversation in the cloud, and not just taking from it, I feel that I do not yet have much to add to it. I understand the tools now, and with a little more experience and a little more synthesis time, I will have more to give back.
This quarter a lot of my posts were about teaching math, and I also commented on other cohort blogs about math and/or exit tickets. For example, here and here.
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