I know that I am a week behind with this blog but I will try to make up for it. It's funny to me how much harder the writing part is than the reading. The same thing is true for my reading challenge blog. I have read close to 50 books since I began the challenge, but I have only managed to blog about 27 of them. Why is that? It really makes me stop and think about some of the work we ask our students to do - and why they sometimes have difficulty getting it done.
I have to say that this class (and the last) became even more relevant to me this week while at the TIES conference in Minneapolis. Bernajean Porter (of DigiTales fame) was one of the featured presenters, most of the sessions had to do with blogging, on-line discussions, wikis, etc. and you couldn't go anywhere without seeing a tweet!!!
I had been following a few people on Twitter before, but I found that I was getting a lot of overlap from the information on my RSS feeds. It seemed that people were tweeting about things they were reading on these blogs and I found that I got more information from reading the blog than the tweet so... I guess I will give it another try. Maybe I need to find different people to follow. I think I will start with some of the fabulous presenters at the TIES conference. (Can you tell that I loved this conference? The only bad part is coming back down to reality when you return to work. I would love to see all of these innovative ideas implemented TODAY but I will be patient and try to keep taking the little steps that will get us there in the future.)
The readings this week have motivated me to make some changes to my Reading Challenge Blog (and to work on updating my postings) and to make some other changes to my wikispace. I am considering switching to Weebly, we'll see. All of my reading over the past 2 weeks has really convinced me that we are on the right track with My Big Campus and some of the other wiki's and blogs that are being used in my school. I will continue to push for some of the more reluctant teachers to at least try blogging themselves in order to see how effective it can be and to follow some other educators on their blogs. Rss feeds are a perfect way to build you personal learning network and continue your education every day. What a great way to connect with fellow educators/experts from around the country and around the world. I have said it before to my staff, but I think it's worth another push.
