Blog? Yes please.

Over the past few years, I have been amazed at how far online publications have become a part of my life.  I currently subscribe to over 15 different educator blogs and learn ideas about   not only what others in my profession are thinking, but what they have to offer to the educational community.  At this time, I am simply offering my lens of how cool I think these things are.  I have read everything from why we should not give homework across every curriculum to seeing some of the coolest approaches to my subject matter.  From other teachers giving 30 day initiatives to becoming friends and communicating with them on Twitter.  In fact, from blog to twitter, I met a few of these people when I went to a conference in summer of 2010 at the ISTE conference.  All of us had a common goal.  A goal to transform education or at least do our part to bring a different approach to how we presented information inside our classrooms.  I have also joined people in webinars along the way.  All because I found their blogs interesting and inspiring and had to take that relationship a little further.

At the beginning of 2010-2011 school year, I naively wanted to introduce blogs into my classroom simply because I could see some of the affordances of them.  I had one of my classes put up all of their presentations online and begin keeping their digital lives archived.  I furthered lessons by keeping my assignments online and commenting on what they were doing.  On the student blogs, they added links that connected them to websites that they would frequently use in my class.  They used them to reflect on their assignments using questions that I had posted.  I also had them begin keeping a diary of vocabulary.  Unfortunately, this proved to be too much work for me and I had to drop it.  Managing their use of the blogs along with building my entire curriculum around teaching the uses of these things proved to be a lot of work that I was not willing to attach to their grades.  I have tried blogs a couple of times because I have seen the power of them.  My most successful story of students learning blogs is that one of my students has managed to keep tuning into his..............and that to me, makes it all worth the effort.  Here is an example of the blog I keep coming back to you.  You will notice my students will be down on the left side, most or all which have not been touched since they were part of my classes.

The thing that will always keep my mind shuffled is that my students were able to intelligently understand the use of blogs.  They searched the internet and found others that they were interested in.  They hated keeping their own up to date because it was subject related, but were also able to see value in the ones that they had read.  The optimist in me simply wants to think that blogging was so new to these students that they had a hard time seeing their own benefit of using them.  I want to think I planted a seed that will lead them to a path of connecting to other people's knowledge and thoughts.  With the population that I teach and the adult troubles that they face, it is important to see that they are not alone.