Newbie

Well, here it is, my first post to my "professional" blog - whatever that means.

When I started teaching, I decided to keep a little imitation-moleskin notebook in which I wrote little anecdotes of my teaching day: ah-ha! (oh-no!) moments, shoulda-woulda-coulda reflections on class activities, etc. It started as a daily practise and at the end of each month, I read over my thoughts and tried to adjust my teaching practise.  As the years passed, I wrote less and less.  I suspect it's because I had no objective (or subjective) feedback.

Enter - Me. Blogging.

Now, I have to admit that I am not new to blogging, per se. I have blogs which are quasi journals to chronicle daily life, memory-keepsakes of events I want to remember. I created them as footprints of some sort, maybe even as a kind of time capsule and I imagined some descendant finding one of my blogs one day in the distant future as a testimony of my existence.  It hadn't occurred to me to blog as a way of sharing my learning as an educator. After all, I had previously only blogged for the time being, for myself - which is not entirely undesirable, but I wondered how blogging was different from journal writing or even keeping a diary (gasp! - at my age, really?). Would my interest in blogging wane like it did for journalling my teaching day?

Two years ago, I started a blog for my classes. At first I used it to summarize class activities, but over the last year, it has become an avenue for assessment, a method of engaging students further in discussion, and a place for students (and parents) to revisit class activities or re-view videos and links. This past October, I also decided to get twittering. I realized fairly quickly the power Twitter has for my own professional development and by extension, the power that technology has for transforming my teaching.

My Twitter PLN has given me a million and one ideas for using technology in my classroom and my administrator keeps encouraging me to blog about how I've been implementing technology. I suppose I should have started this blog earlier as a companion to my tweets, but truthfully, I had no idea where to begin. I feel like such a noob - but, that's not necessarily a bad thing now, is it?