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
