Friday, August 3, 2012

Blogging about Blogging

I spent a couple of hours scrolling through the different blogs on Kristin's and Jeff's lists. I was happy to see Nytimes education and tech page as I frequent both for fun reads. I am somewhat of a nytimes junky and dedicate a significant portion of my free time to reading article after article. Unfortunately,  I have never found the nytimes education page to be very inspiring. Most articles pertain to budget cuts and fairly gloomy outlooks for the field. Those are at least the articles that stick out in mind, which might say something about my personality.

I also enjoyed reading a blog called "Speaking of History," which is written by a middle school history teacher. The author seems to share some of my dorky interest and I really enjoyed reading about his trip to Monticello. He had posted a picture of Jefferson's portable ivory journal and it made me want to explore a museum myself and post about some unusual finds.

Looking back through some of his older posts, I found a number of articles about software he uses in his class. I think this would be a great way to stay current with technology once I leave the mac program and find projects/exercises that work. While in Japan I had great success using blogs as a resource of ideas. As I lived in an extremely remote region, I was sort of an island amongst myself. If I wanted to share ideas the best resource was blogs. Many a times my class was saved by a quick search on a blog called jhsenglipediaproject. Games were sorted by lesson topic and rated, which was most useful as lots of stuff out there is terrible. In all, that site saved me hours of prep time and made my class much more diverse than if I had just relied on my own ideas. Sharing information is always beneficial to creating a better product and education is no different.

3 comments:

  1. I'm glad to see that you haven't given up on technology entirely!

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  2. Hi there - Maybe this NYTimes digital column, which features resources on how to integrate current events into teaching, would be more optimistic? http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/

    Gosh, you know, I never really thought about it, but YES, much of the writing on education is a downer lately. Have you been to dianeravitch.net? She'll depress you about the corporatization and politization of pulbic education, but she'll also gather up inspiring stories about teachers beating the odds. But make no mistake: you WILL be depressed. :)

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  3. Hey Jack, I agree with your thoughts on using blogs and other forms of social media like twitter and facebook to keep in touch with different approaches to teaching as well as on incorporating technology into our classrooms. Once the MAC program is over, I'm sure most of us will keep in touch and share ideas and resources with one another, but if you are at a loss it's always a great idea to check different places on the internet for inspiration.

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