A Teacher’s Thoughts

Last year I began using a blogging engine to run my class web site. That single change allowed me to meet my goal of maintaining an updated class website. Prior to using a blogging engine, I was constantly dealing with layout, FTP and other issues. In other words a blog allowed my updating efforts to be sustainable. Most of my posts last year were my weekly notices. I posted these, usually on Mondays, at the beginning of each week to give an overview of the week ahead. This was well received by students and parents. Occasionally I used my blog as a place to write about other things particularly to get students thinking about science and learning. Certainly the best result of that was our eventual involvement with the ISS07 project following a post I wrote and many student comments on the topic. Alas, the task of actually blogging with my class site was not sustainable last year.

My main goal for my class site this year is to blog on a science related topic at least weekly. My hope is to model my own curiosity and enthusiasm in this digital environment. I also want to model reading and thinking about science topics. Again this year students will be using Google Reader to keep tabs on science news. I am expecting some writing from them on these assignments so I hope my blog to serve as one model for the process.

So far I have managed three posts on my class site that meet my goal. Hopefully I can revisit this post in the spring and report back successfully.