Teacher blogs

Blogs, a great way for discussing topics of your choice.  Keeping a teacher blog for a classroom is a great way of informing parents of what's going on inside the classroom. These blogs can be updated daily, weekly, or monthly. It's a useful tool because parents have the ability to leave comments on each blog.

Your individual blog can also be designed to your liking. Pictures, links, color of fonts, and background color can all be added.Blogs can also be kept up by students. Depending on age group a student can be assigned weekly (as opposed to the teacher) to update the classroom blog and inform parents in what's been done at the end of the week.

Another interesting idea could be to have each student (with parent supervision) keep a blog to share with classmates and teacher on a specific topic done that week in the classroom. According to David Huffaker "weblogs are an excellent way to fuse educational technology and storytelling inside the classroom and beyond school walls. Because their format is similar to a personal diary, where recounting tales and autobiographical events is prevalent, blogs provide an arena where self–expression and creativity are encouraged. Its linkages to other bloggers establish the same peer–group relationships found in nonvirtual worlds. Its "underdetermined" design, where a system is engaging, yet intuitive and easy to learn (Cassell, 2002), makes it equitable for many age groups and both genders, and simple for teachers to implement. Being situated within the Internet allows bloggers to access their blogs anywhere and anytime an Internet connection is available, an opportunity for learning to continue outside the classroom. Blogs are both individualistic and collaborative. Blogs promote self–expression, a place where the author can develop highly personalized content. Yet blogs connect with an online community — bloggers can comment and give feedback to other bloggers, and they can link to fellow bloggers, creating an interwoven, dynamic organization. In the classroom, students can have a personal space to read and write alongside a communal one, where ideas are shared, questions are asked and answered, and social cohesion is developed."

Resource:  http://frodo.lib.uic.edu/ojsjournals/index.php/fm/article/view/1156/1076

Picture: http://www.thethinkingstick.com/starting-the-school-year-off-with-a-blog/

Do we teach out of convenience?

In order to answer this question one must be able to experience it in a classroom. I can't say I've had the opportunity to do this. I've been in and out of classrooms but none that's been my own. I do believe teachers teach what is most convenient for them.

Teachers are given requirements and standards they are to teach. Sometimes teaching technology is the requirement of the computer teacher. Teachers do what they can in oder to integrate technology in the classroom. In some schools it is required for students to spend 30 minutes daily using a reading and math program.

I have one question in regards to this question though, how are we as teachers supposed to prepare students for the future if technology continues to evolve? Programs continue to update, versions change, and models get make overs. By the time students are able to go out into the real world things will be so much different than what they experienced in the classroom, they'll have to re-teach themselves everything again (this is what I had to do!).

Thankfully students are surrounded by technology that having to adapt to the newer models and re-teach themselves won't be that big of a deal.