It’s getting to the point where I’m finding just about one new site a day from my referer logs, and today’s winner is the Madison County High School (Va.) Athletics site. I got there from this K-12 Web log workshop page which covers a two-hour training for teachers. It’s great to see more and more of these as well.
One thing struck me as I looked at the workshop schedule, and it’s an element that’s missing from my own workshop materials. That’s a portion dedicated to blogging the verb. Terry‘s back on that important subject, and I’m starting to think that I need to do a lot more to encourage teachers to blog (v) before using a blog (n). I spend a lot of time writing and talking to people about how the tool can help facilitate the teaching process, but not as much about the learning process. I think that’s primarily because teachers have no understanding of using Web logs to learn and reflect simply because they haven’t done it. It goes back to “Teach blogs? Blog!” It’s essential to understand the power of this.
Next time I teach Web logs to teachers, I’m going to ask them to post a week’s worth of reflections to it before giving them their CEUs. That means I get to spend time talking about blogging the verb, which is turning out to be one of my more favorite subjects…
As you know, I started blogging after reading your “Teach blogs? Blog” post in Sept. Simple, yet essential. Last week I started a shared journal in my Learn,Teach,Learn blog called “Reflective Learning” and am doing a workshop afterschool today in which I’ll show teachers how to log on and start blogging. I figured this would be a good way to give teachers some blogging experience before I teach a prof. dev. blogging class in January in which teachers will create a blog to use for a Standards based project. I realized they should blog first before jumping into the murky waters of student blogging. I’m offering an incentive–use the blog to reflect on our Reading First goals and I will give participants earned time toward mandatory Reading First hours.