Other Education Blogs

Before this class and assignment I was not connected to the blog world at all, and to be honest I did not really understand how blogging worked and why people would need or use them. I have really enjoyed seeing how creative my classmates are and reading their blog posts has given me a little insight to their writing style and online personality. I have really enjoyed using my blog for this class, while I am not as creative in my writing style or blog appearance as some of my other classmates I have enjoyed having this space to write my thoughts. It has also been powerful for me to see how my classmates have interpreted the things we are discussing in class and how different we all are. After exploring some of the educational blogs listed on cTools I am excited of the possibility of this being a major resource when I am a teacher.

For this week I read some post from Elona Hartjes's blog Teacher At Risk and Dan Myer's blog dy/dan. The Teacher At Risk blog was more about the state of education in our country in general. She often has a TED talks attached to her blog or other education articles. The topics are thought provoking and very interesting. I think that when I am teaching I may use this blog to see what is "new" in education discussion and how I can incorporate it into my teaching. I am not sure I would use this blog all of the time but I think it is important to go back and look at information about education in a general sense from time to time to make sure you are not getting to caught up in your one classroom or school setting.

The other blog I looked at dy/dan is a math education blog. These seem a little bit harder to come by and I would guess this is because publishing your writing for the world to see is a littler nerve racking for a math person (like me for example). But this blog is great!! I did not read all of the posts but one that I did read and really enjoyed was looking at a standard math problem form a text book and showing how he used it in his classroom and connected much better in real world questions. He lays out the steps that he went through to change a mundane problem in a text book about tires skid marks and speed into a real world problem about car accidents. The steps he outlines can be used on most story problems that are presented in text books.

This blog is very cool as a math teacher and I think that I could use a blog like this daily to see what he has been doing and how I can do some of these things in my classroom. This blog also inspired me to want to do more research into other math teachers blogs and maybe even start using blogging as a way to share activities that were sucessful in my classroom.

Over all this blogging assignment has shown me the power and possibilities of blogs and how excited I am to use them in developing my teacher education!