As a classroom teacher my students had a blog, even my second graders. We blogged in response to our class read aloud, we blogged about ourselves, we blogged to reflect on our learning and to activate our background knowledge.
Last year when I switched from classroom teacher to literacy coach I thought many times that I needed to have a literacy blog for teachers. The only thing holding me back was the time it would take. I am thinking this might be the year, I have my feet a little more grounded understanding my role and responsibilities. I could see myself using a blog with teachers in two different ways. One as a reflection tool for myself and a form of collaboration with other literacy coaches, where I would blog about struggles, ideas, literacy questions and reflections. The other way I could see myself using a blog is for classroom teachers. I get 30 minutes a week with teachers and that is not enough time to convey all of the ideas, information and strategies they might be interested in trying. I could use the blog as a way to send information out and allow teachers to look over it on their own time. I could also use the blog as a reflection tool from our morning meetings. Allowing a place for teachers to reflect and continue the conversation after morning meetings are complete.
Now knowing myself well I need to pick one way to use a blog. Sometimes I tend to jump and do everything all at once and then find myself overwhelmed. So my next step is to ponder which blog I want to do this year and get started.
I like the idea about teachers using the blog to reflect about your team meetings and/or a coaching event.
ReplyDeleteReflection is such an important part of learning and sometimes we do not take the time to really think about the learning event.
The blog would support time for reflection.
Barbara
You are completely right about needing to reflect. Too often we are pressured to get from Point A to Point B without ever really reflecting on the practices we are using. I'd love to be able to have more reflection time. I know my wife started forcing herself to do it each day this year and I can see the difference it is making on her lesson plans.
ReplyDeleteI really love the idea of sharing additional resources and strategies with teachers. There could be a lot of discussion about hang-ups or issues a teacher had when implementing. other teachers could support with their classroom experiences.
ReplyDeleteI love that a blog is a resource that you can connect to at any time, at any place. I think there is great value in that.