Blogging is way more about reading than it is writing.

Dean hits the nail on the head with this one. Great post on what makes blogging succeed with students and teachers. Read it. Plus check out some excellent student blogs from Room Twelve, and Tina Coffey from Salem has some great 2nd grade blogs going on this summer.

In addition to this I’ve read some compelling posts by edu-bloggers as well. Specifically this post from Will Richardson titled, “What I Hate about Twitter.” The comments here are excellent in terms of what this whole thing means to others. At the same time I’ve been aware, more or less, of what I call the ‘house of mirrors’ or ‘the echo chamber,’ that we edu-blogger techie folks tend to live in. As I’ve become more aware of this, I now want to work this next year to expand these ideas and these practices throughout my ‘overly small’ school division in southwest virginia. i’m compiling some simple goals to work towards next year that i think will help.

The area that I’ve been chewing hard on is that area that has to do with the whole emphasis on standardized testing. It seems often that the focus of using educational techology is on how we improve test scores. Not that this is a horrible thing, but it seems to me that it is perhaps a little misguided. At the same time, the internal dialogue pushes back when I remind myself that the teachers with whom I work are judged based on how their particular group of students score on the test at the end of the year. Keep those test scores up and you’re good. If they’re low then things can get dicey.

My focus is less on the test score but more on the fact that we want teachers to use technology in appropriate ways in their classrooms because this is the world in which their students live. Or will live, if they don’t already. Even in my overly small school division.

Finally, my blogroll over to the right there has some good stuff to check out. Feel free and enjoy.

~ until next time~

no specific comments yet, but i like this blog. i just like it.

Today while working on a website for one of our art teachers, I listened to Will Richardson give a presentation on using Web 2.0 tools in education. He talked about what it means to teach our students for what lies ahead in their lives, rather than what is happening today. He also spoke about the realities of teaching now–assessments, time constraints, blocking sites, etc. etc. It was quite informative. You can check out this show and others that he has done at his Ustream website.

This is a great podcast from John Hendron, over at Goochland County Public Schools. There’s a lot of potential in this tool and John does a great job of explaining it. I can’t wait to introduce this to a few teachers that I know will enjoy working with their students on this.

This is a nice GenTech ‘field report’ done by Tina, interviewing Meg. The project is such a good description of getting students involved with something that allows Meg to share her passion for diving. Enjoy this one–’tis good!

Do you twitter? I’ve been trying this out for a bit, feeling both excited about it and also a ‘what’s the point?’ type of thing. I think that as I follow more education folks though, it starts to make sense . . . .check it out if you haven’t!

I found this site today. It’s run on the social networking aggregation of sites known as ‘ning.’ One of the issues that I find to be true is that there are simply so many blogs out there to read and choose from. Even using RSS, one only has so much time to read. So, it can be a trick to find the ones that are relevant to you and your needs. I find that over time my reading changes as well–blogs come and go–which is fine. I’ll be adding more to my blog roll on the sidebar in time, as I find blogs that are currently worthwhile. 

More soon~