Reflective Blog Post About Blogs or "Whoa. Meta."
Last night was #flipclass.
Don't know about #flipclass? It's an education, Twitter chat held every Monday at 7:00 Central. All the cool kids are doing it.
Anyway. The topic was blogging. And during the conversation, I re-realized that part of the magic of writing and reflection isn't so much the final product--it's that working through your ideas helps you develop better ones.
And I realized I have this blog here where, sure, occasionally I'll post something amusing from class, but I don't really utilize it to get better. As awesome as Storm with a mohawk and the Hawkeye/Hawkeye bromance are, those things aren't making me a better teacher.
So I thought I'd try being a reflective practitioner. Not just in my head. Not just in the Word document that I start every year around third quarter when the "oh my god I've screwed up this year so bad next year will be so much better" blues hit. But doing it here, in front of the millions . . . AND MILLIONS . . . of Tumblr followers around the world.*
So the question last night was how to utilize blogs in the classroom, in addition to how we use them to develop our PLN (which I think means Professional Learning Network, but, honestly, I'm still new at this whole "using social media besides reblogging CM Punk drawings" thing).
I've used Blogger in the past, but I was unhappy because I mostly used them as reading journals.
For next year, I want to work in a lot more reflection. An idea I'm toying with is that every two to three weeks, students write a reflective piece based on their exit slips--a sort of, "Hey, what did we do in class this month?" thing. This might fit well on a blog and be good for a first time out.
In a perfect world, though, we use the blogs to express 20% Time activities.
So how this would work is that the student chooses something he or she is interested in near the start of the year. Then throughout the year, they do research or keep up with that topic. Their blog could be where they post/reflect/develop their findings. In other words, students create actual blogs and not just "oh my god my teacher is making me do this this is totes lame" Internet-writing-sucks they typically produce.
*I only have, like, seventy-nine followers.
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