More Ed Bloggers

Lately, there’s been a small but growing group of classroom educators who have been simply inspiring in the things they’re blogging about, and I think there are a couple others to add to the list. In no particular order, Clarence Fisher, Darren Kuropatwa, Bud Hunt, Konrad Glogowski and Dean Shareski have been teaching me a lot by the way they’ve been chronicling their experiences. They’re dealing with such important issues, coming up with great remixes, and bringing their students’ voices into the story. Great stuff.

James Matthew and Tim Frederick are two others. Here’s a snip from the former:

The ‘hyperlink’ style of reading also seems to bring with it cognitive gaps , as students jump from skimming one topic to the next, in a style similar to ‘free association.’ The problem is, only students who are self motivated will come back on their own initiative to fill in those gaps. As a teacher, I find I am constantly pointing students back to topics or areas on the web/text that they should’ve covered in the first place. Hyperlink-style reading is great for keeping interest and for ‘specialised reading’ (read: reading only for what interests you personally), but seems to produce a pastiche style of understanding with a lot of gaps to fill in. Unfortunately, students who are not self motivated seem to turn to the teacher for the answers, instead of backtracking and filling in those cognitive gaps on their own.

And here is one from Tim’s blog:

Now, I’m getting into using wikis for various purposes. I wrote in my last post about using a wiki for the ELA department in my school and our venture in creating a true vision and resource for the department. Now, I’m using a wiki for my lesson planning. Such a simple idea, but it makes writing lesson plans a bit easier since I can do it anywhere there’s Internet. The added benefit is that I can make the wiki public and offer my lesson plans to others with little added effort. I only have a few lessons on there now, but after using it for a while I can see it being a library of lesson plans. Imagine if whole groups of teachers did the same thing the amount of lesson plans we could have online and available for sharing.

That group is sending some quality stuff to my aggregator just about every day. Might be time for a mashup of these new blogging voices…

If you’ve reading others like this, please share.