As a beginning teacher, I was told that good teachers
beg/borrow/steal great teaching ideas from other teachers. Sometimes those
ideas would work with my classes, other times they wouldn’t, but I was told
that it’s the way to start learning how to come up with my own engaging
teaching ideas—using the ideas that I’d found or borrowed as a starting point.
After attending the 2009 New
Mexico Library Association conference and being introduced to the world of
Professional Learning Networks (PLNs), that notion presented about the sharing
of ideas took on a whole new meaning. Since then, my Google Reader has exploded with the
blogs of teachers around the world who are dedicated to becoming better
teachers. I chose four blogs that I connected with and read often to share with
you.
For technology, “The
Innovative Educator” (http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com)
This blog was one of the first blogs I started following
regularly. If you want to talk about technology integration, “The Innovative
Educator” should be your first stop. The blog’s author, Lisa, just finished a
series of posts on applying mobile technology to Marzano’s strategies from
Classroom Instruction that Works.
As a model for
reflective practice, “Meandering Musings of an Indie Teacher” (http://jtspencer.blogspot.com)
John Spencer reflects on interactions with students, and comments
on the educational world. Sometimes he does this with cartoons, sometimes with
words, and sometimes with videos. Recently, he posted videos in a series called
“Motivation and Metaphor,” where he, as the name suggests, talks about
motivation using metaphors. I’ll admit that I don’t always agree with what I
read in this blog, but reading the reflections posted here make me think about
my teaching practice.
For middle-grade book
recommendations, “The Reading Zone” (http://thereadingzone.wordpress.com)
and “Musings of a Book Addict” (http://www.musingsofabookaddict.com)
One thing we know about people and reading is that they’re
more likely to do it if they’re reading something that they find interesting.
Sometimes finding books to match with students can be difficult. No matter how
well versed we are in the world of young adult literature, there will always be
a few who throw us for a loop. This semester, I had a student who wanted to
read Civil War era historical fiction. The authors of these two blogs talk
about the books they’re reading, the books their students are reading, and
updates on the literacy world.
There’s an interconnected network of educational blogs on
the Internet, just waiting to be tapped into. Many ideas, like using the
educational social networking site Edmodo
as a back
channel or creating a facebook
profile as an assessment, become viral and get picked up by
a number of bloggers. The four above are my little slice of the blogosphere; I
hope they can be as useful to you as they are to me.
--Laura Oldham, Red Mountain Middle School
