Blogging in education reflection...

3 Blog reviews:

1. http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=46439&newlimit=25
This blog is created by Mary Bernhardt. It has been updated quite frequently if not daily during the present school year. This blog appears to be a way for this teacher to communicate with students about assignments and a place for students to check on assignments each night. One comment I would have though is that this blog has been used since Sept. 2006 and I could only see one students comment that was not responded to by the teacher within the blog. I think if a teacher is going to go through so much trouble to update this blog each night I would think it might be important to try and have the students communicate with them through the blog as well. It also doesn’t tell a person outside of the class community exactly what this blog is. I am assuming that it is for a high school English class. But there could be more of a title to give someone an idea of exactly what this blog is for or what one might find if they read the blog. There isn’t even an initial blog post explaining its purpose to the students.

2. http://cpeppler.edublogs.org/
This blog appears to have been created by a teacher who was excited to use new technology that he/she learned about in a book on blogs, wikis, etc. It seems that the teacher did actually use a blog with a summer school classroom but as far as this personal blog it seems that in the past few years there isn’t even on average a post per month. The purpose of this blog I think for this teacher is to share what they are doing and just a lot of things that they are learning in books, article, in the news, etc. and see if anyone has anything interesting to respond to these thoughts with.

3. http://blog.teachervision.fen.com/
This blog is a middle school math teacher who is kind of just throwing out ideas about how to teach certain lessons in math classes and what worked. I especially liked her entries that are reflecting on what worked or didn’t work and how she corrected what she had done or what she did that was really a success.

Brainstorming about how I might use a Blog:
I think if there was a network of teachers that were all teaching the same subject matter it would be more than beneficial to be a part of that type of blog. As a first year teacher I am constantly struggling to keep track of all 5 of my classes each day and sometimes that doesn’t even touch on being able to focus in on the material in each subject. I think it would be helpful for me in terms of getting a frame of reference on how to teach particular things that I haven’t taught before and figuring out if that might work in my classroom.
I like the last blog that I reviewed. I would be helpful if the posts were even more frequent but I really liked how it was very reflective. Blogging is an excellent way to be a reflective educator and assuming that you have well meaning people reading and responding to your blog posts it would be a great way to get input and constructive criticism when needed although if you have spiteful or mean people it is possible that you might not want to know how those people would respond to how you teach or a decision you made or even mistake you may have made in teaching.

Internet Class...

So I've never created a personal blog before. This is my first one and clearly I am creating it during a graduate class. You might say " What are you doing in grad school if you're not even going to pay attention?" I would respond by saying " THIS IS MY ACTUAL CLASS ASSIGNMENT! I am paying attention. :-p"