EdTech Blogs to Follow (Thing 13)

This "thing" was really difficult for me! I already feel like I have too much information to digest regarding my teaching practice, too many things I'd like to learn or implement, just from talking to my colleagues and attending conferences. Add in Twitter and blogs and my head just about explodes! So while this list of bloggers was helpful in that it gave me some direction (rather than just Googling topics I'd like to learn about) and more people who could help, it was also sort of overwhelming because I wanted to read everything everyone wrong. And take notes. And ask everyone follow-up questions.

I settled for reading the most recent post of each blogger to see if he or she were someone I would learn from. It turns out that I was following a few of them on Twitter already, so I was semi-familiar with their ideas. The blogs that I thought were worth following for me were ones that dealt with educational technology in general or language arts specifically; the blogs that were more geared toward STEM or new gadget/products don't really interest me and aren't applicable to my classroom, which is what this course is all about for me. 

Of the list we were provided, Audrey Watters and Josh Stumpenhorst wrote the most readable blogs for me. They were musings on how to improve education in general and what technology can do to help us. I feel like these two write much in the same way that I do; this doesn't mean their blogs are better, it just means that they feel familiar to me and therefore I am more likely to read them. Vicki Davis and Scott McLeod both have a wealth of information to share that is curated very well, and they use podcasts and voice notes, respectively, which is a cool way to interact with their audience. I loved that Smart Brief on Ed Tech allowed me to choose which categories I wanted to hear more about in their newsletter, and I was already a fan of Edutopia, both in terms of their content and how they deliver it. I'm also looking forward to reading more of Monica Burns' reading and writing tech tips because I'm always looking for other teachers who are incorporating technology into the subjects I teach. As always, I appreciated that many of the blogs had newsletters I could sign up for and read at my convenience, and several of the bloggers are also on Twitter, which is my preferred social media platform right now. 

One thing that I learned about my own blogging from looking through these blogs was that I should try to make my entries shorter and more focused when I'm writing for a larger audience. Since these entries are reflections for class, I tend to write longer, and I think that's okay. But if I were trying to build an audience from strangers on the internet, I would want to have shorter, more focused pieces that others could read quickly and easily. I appreciated the blogs that had cleaner layouts (not with ads or including photos or Twitter feeds) and I liked when they linked to articles for further reading. My students don't blog for an audience beyond our class, but that might be a good way to get them some real-world "publishing" experience. If we incorporate that into class, I'd have them read some student blogs and decide who they wanted their audience to be so they could focus their content more easily.

However, all that being said, Dr. Alec Couros' "The Connected Teacher" video was my favorite part of this "thing." He said so many important and relevant things in under 13 minutes, and he said them in an easily understood and organized way. I often (okay, almost always!) find myself wanting to take notes when I watch these videos, and the fact that he listed two or three important things and then reiterated them made that much easier for me.

I think my favorite part of this video was when he said that the question we need to ask ourself is "What endures?" Over and over again, I've heard and believed that the most important thing about education is the relationships that we build with our students and our colleagues. Dr. Couros said it here beautifully: the tools that we use to teach will come and go, but the relationships that we create will endure. We should "build the kind of relationship that [we] are willing to continue even when the tool goes away." This is a great way to understand that our goal should be to connect with people in such a way that it will make us pursue the relationship even when the tool we used to build that relationship is no longer around. In other words, if I connect with an author via my blog and that relationship matters to me, I should be motivated to continue that relationship via another means if my blog doesn't endure.

The other thing I really liked was when he identified two central questions and three steps that he expected his students to explain. Although he teaches undergraduate students, I think these are also applicable to my middle schoolers, and I will be doing my best to incorporate them into my classroom next year.

Central Questions:

1. How are you making learning visible?

2. How are you contributing to others' learning?

(image via https://icestentatious06.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/umbrella2.jpg?w=586&h=505)

I found this image and I thought it matched with Dr. Couros' message - it also reminded me of the end of the video when the man interviewing him said that they had used the word "learning" much more than the word "education" in their chat. That stuck with me because I think it's worth noting that today, we talk a lot more about "education" than "learning" when we decide on policies for children. What is the point of the education if the children aren't learning? (More on that later, I'm sure.) 

Steps to Show Learning:

1. Here is my learning.

2. Here is what my learning meant.

3. This is how I perform my learning (help others to learn).

(image via https://isb21.wikispaces.com/file/view/21st_logo.jpg/33110593/21st_logo.jpg)

I think this image sums up what Dr. Couros was talking about when he said that networks are essential in education. Our students (and we!) have to be learners, but they also have to be creators and collaborators. I especially like how the person who created this image included the adjective "tenacious." I have noticed that the longer I teach, the more I encounter students who lack perseverance and critical thinking skills. I think it's because so much information is readily available to them; they have learned that they can find the "right answer" almost instantly, so they are unused to solving problems for themselves. When we build networks and connect with others, we need to be tenacious and flexible so we can find what we need and figure out how to use it. This is a great reminder for everyone.

I also found this image that I think speaks to what we've been talking about during this course so far and in our department and team meetings this year. It's something that I'll revisit throughout the year, hopefully, to help my lessons reach more students and stay on track.

(image via https://wisconsin2008.wikispaces.com/file/view/whereto_long2.jpg/35046937/whereto_long2.jpg)

Before beginning this course, I knew there was a ton of excellent information available to me online via social media and other teacher networks. It's been fun discovering all of the different perspectives and ideas in the teaching and learning world, but it has also been overwhelming. I think part of what I need to do this summer is learn how to manage and review the material that's going to be the most applicable to what I'm doing in the classroom. Otherwise, I'll just collect an online version of that file cabinet in my classroom that hasn't been touched since 2008.

Responding to "Blogging as Reflective Practice" (Thing 3 Stretch)

In her post "Blogging as Reflective Practice", Gina Minks explains how she uses blogging as a way to reflect on and better her job performance as well as how it can create communities. I happen to agree with this on a deep level since it was blogging (in large part) that sustained my connection to my teaching practice when I took a year off to go to graduate school literally 1,000 miles away from the school where I teach.

Ms. Minks mentions that people seem to think bloggers have too much time on their hands or that blogging is superficial. While it can be a great time-waster, it can also be deeply reflective and time-consuming. She links in her blog to a 2007 study out of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom that concluded that blogging benefited students and encouraged reflection as well as linked the students' lives outside of the classroom to the activities that they completed inside of it. The very idea that educational blogging has occupied a prominent enough position to be the subject of an academic study says to me that we cannot dismiss it as something that bored teenagers do when they feel like no one is listening to them.  

Putting ideas into words has always helped me solidify my feelings on a subject and exposed when I do and do not understand something fully. If I can't summarize it, then I didn't get it. Both my undergraduate and graduate institutions placed a very high emphasis on reflection, and although it doesn't much matter to me whether I do that reflection on a piece of paper or online, there is no doubt that that early practice has stayed with me into my almost ten-year teaching career. I still take the time to jot a few notes after almost every lesson, and when I can take a moment to blog about them, I do it. I haven't done it much lately, but perhaps this will help jumpstart me back into the habit.

The one major benefit that blogging has over private journaling is that you can, if you so choose, open up your blog to the whole world. It is because of this access that I have confined my blogging to the professional domain; after all, I'm not sure that anyone really wants to hear my thoughts about "The Bachelor" or the latest Adele album (although I do have a lot of thoughts about both of those!). The great thing about blogging about teaching is that it immediately invites thousands of other teachers right into your classroom - if something went poorly, all of those other sets of (mostly supportive, because who really reads teacher blogs to fling mud?) experienced eyes can tell me exactly where I went wrong and how to fix it. One of the best and most fulfilling teaching experiences I have had is co-teaching. I know that some people don't like the idea of more adults in their classrooms, but I have always found that having another teacher in my room immediately lifts the caliber of my teacher. Not because I'm trying to show off, but because I have another professional whom I trust implicitly there to give me timely and specific feedback on my practice. Blogging about teaching is like having thousands of co-teachers available to me at a moment's notice.

Blogging is also one of the best practices in revision that I, as a writer and a teacher of writing, have ever experienced. Because my audience is potentially so large (not that my blogs have ever garnered a ton of attention, let's be clear about that), I'm much more careful about what I write and how I write it because I don't want to be misconstrued. I fact-check once, twice, and on the more controversial topics, three and four more times because I want to be absolutely sure I'm right. Isn't this what we want our students to do? I realized this was one of the best real-world writing exercises I could give my students as I was writing that last sentence and will now try to incorporate this into my teaching next year. We do online discussions fairly regularly, but I have never tried to use blogs because of the privacy issues. We'll see if I can make it work.

So...reflective practice in action. It was literally as I was typing those words that I realized I could make the revision point to my students with this example better than I ever could if their audience was just going to be their classmates and me. Because for better or for worse, sometimes kids in this generation care more about what the internet thinks than what I think. Why not use that to sneakily get them to use the right there/their/they're?