I am very interested in setting up and using a blog to help enhance and improve the classes I teach. There are so many resources, concepts, ideas, and fun facts I learn as I design/modify lessons that I will never have the opportunity to introduce my students to. In thinking abut a blog I started to brainstorm some items or categories of thing I would want to include to make it functional and interesting.
- One blog for each grade level/curriculum.
- Links to fun websites and other sources of science games and information for the kids.
- Pictures: in class work (don't know if this is legal or not), general pictures that relate to units.
- RSS feeds to great publications that I don't have the funding to have delivered to the school.
- Possible Podcasts: My own (if I ever get to that level), itunes, or Laboutloud.com
- Frequency of updates... This one I would love to be optomistic and say once a week by in setting up a class website this year, I have found that these extra resources QUICKLY get forgotten in the multitude of other teaching responsibilities I have. Instead I am thinking 3 times per unit, beginning, middle and end.
- Questions Board- I hope to make a questions board similar to a commonly used post-it note practice in class called a Parking Lot. My hope is to have this be a section where students can post and answer each others questions.
WOW... I guess my goals are extremely lofty... maybe I will take it one step at a time and start with just 3 posts per unit and a links section.
One thing that I have found interesting is how blogs that initially were set up for students morphed and became shared teacher resources. I really desire a functional way to store and display all of my worksheets and lesson plans so they can be accessed and get feedback from others.
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In my school we have an "all staff" folder on the network drive. Within that folder there are folders by grade level and subject. I never really utilized the all staff folder until this year but it is a great way to share information with colleagues. The one area that is lacking is a forum for feedback so I think it would be interesting to learn which tools can best accomplish this as well as your other goals.
ReplyDeleteI agree with taking one step at a time. I can visualize many uses like you. I was talking to colleagues yesterday about how to implement technologist in the classroom. There seemed to be a general consensus to start with one idea, become comfortable with it yourself, then implement the idea into your classroom. I definitely think it is key for a teacher to be comfortable with the technology before it is implemented as a classroom resource. Otherwise, it would seem that this new idea will be used less and less and eventually forgotten.
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