Thinking about Blogging… on my Blog
Next week I am leading a workshop on Blogging in the Classroom at the Peel District School Board’s 21st Century Teaching and Learning Symposium. So I have been thinking about blogging a lot the last few weeks. This blog. The fact that I don’t seem to have enough time to write on it. And how good it is just to stop, think, and write something down. You know- reflect. So, I intend to write a lot about Blogging this week, to model what it can do for me as a teacher and also for my students, as writers.
Here are some important reasons to Blog, as a teacher professional:
- Blogging is a deep form of reflection on our teaching practices and results in being a better teacher
- Blogging involves engagement in a wider professional community of teachers with similar interests
- Blogging challenges our beliefs and practices as teachers and creates a Personal Learning Network
- Student Bloggers become better critical thinkers, by sharing their ideas, supporting their ideas and defending their ideas
- Student Bloggers share their writing with a wider authentic audience, beyond their own teacher, and are likely to feel more accountable
- Student Bloggers learn how to be 21st century communicators, by embedding images, audio, and video into their text
There are many Blogs out there that are about Blogging and here’s one that explained 7 Reasons Why Teachers Should Blog!
One of the most important aspects to blogging is linking your blog to another blog, like I just did. It so happens that another Grade 7 teacher I know has written about his students and their blogs this week. I’ll discuss this connection between Blogs in the next post.
The Rodcast 
