Saturday, September 29, 2007

Using Blogs in My Classroom


These past few weeks I really feel I'm "back" but not as a teacher, but as a student. So many things to read and write. So many things to do for the first time. First, tagging and social bookmarking with delicious, then learning the killer ap with bloglines, and most recently, joining the blogosphere with blogger.
I would like to have a blog to share my teaching experiences - share thoughts and ideas about teaching - what has worked and what hasn't - about things that I've seen in the classroom - dealing with students - explore important teaching and learning issues.
A class blog sounds like a great idea - posting information about events and homework assignments - communicating with parents. For a social studies class, I would think a class blog would be great for gathering and organizing Internet sources - posting photos - encouraging student responses - introducing additional discussion topics. For an ESL class, I like the idea of providing online readings for students to read and react to - create a writing circle for students to contribute to and make comments.

Friday, September 28, 2007

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Second: First Post-Blog

I was reading a blog from the teacher at 21st century schoolhouse. Apparently she took about a three month break, so her blogroll has over 3000 unread entries. I guess, you have to be careful and not get too popular or you might have to hire some helpers to read and make additional responses.

The teacher, Ms Miller, has an English class this year and her school has provided 25 laptaps for her students. Wow! I've been out of the loop for a while, so I wonder how common is it for schools (public and private) to do this. It's been 15 years since I taught in an American classroom. I wonder how things have changed.