Growth as a Blogger and a Teacher

The most notable way that I have grown as being public as a teacher this quarter has been via Pinterest and through blogging back and forth with my cooperating teacher.

At the beginning of Winter Quarter, I started a blog for my daily reflections. I did this at my field supervisors suggestion, because I am experiencing so much right now, and it will be helpful to reflect back and see how much I've learned over time. It is also a space for me to think back and reflect on any obstacles or problems I ran into during the day. I decided to give my cooperating teacher accessibility to the blog as well, and now I can gain her insight and feedback on the days as well. I've found this to be useful in my current placement as my cooperating teacher and I don't often have time to chat during the day (we are so ridiculously busy!) but having my thoughts and questions up on the blog gives her a chance to see them and to comment back on them when she has the time. This is an example of me actively seeking and giving feedback on my professional thinking and it is directly applied to my growth as a kindergarten teacher in my main teaching placement. 

Pinterest and the teachers I have followed has helped me to delve into professional conversations happening in the community of teaching. I feel like my unique placement of kindergarten is really supported by a site like pinterest, where you can see exactly how other teachers modeled their thinking and exactly how they gave visual support to their students. I have been talking to my CT about implementing a sort of "kindness campaign" in our classroom (we both agree that it is definitely needed!) and I've been using Pinterest to get ideas of how to embark on something like that in our class. I've been looking into books like "How Full is Your Bucket" and all the assorted workshops and projects that you can have students do along with reading the book. I've found that my students retain the knowledge best when they can visually see and kinesthetically act out what they are going to do. Pinterest has provided me a plethora of ways to do this!

Real Students, Really Blogging!

We've been talking and discussing and questioning the integration of technology in our classrooms and how we might best utilize technology to get it into our students hands. This past week at my dyad, I observed students blogging!

These eighth graders were blogging up a storm by contributing to the classroom blog of student's book reflections. My cooperating teacher has them read books from different genres every quarter, and they write a reflection of the book after they are finished and post it to the blog. When looking for a new book, they can select a genre that they would like to read next, and can use the reviews from past students to give them an idea of whether or not they would like to choose that book.

I've been asking myself about students blogging in the classroom, and what would that look like? With little funding, would that be possible? In this instance, it seems to work really well. Students are blogging for a purpose and are writing about books that are important to them. In my opinion, blogging in this case is better than the alternative. Instead of writing for the teacher as audience, these blog contributors are writing for the audience of their peers. Instead of handing in a paper copy of a review to a teacher who would keep it, grade it, and return it, a whole community of readers and writers is being maintained by this blog. Pretty neat, if I do say so.