Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Starting again...

Here I go again...

This isn't my first experience with blogging. I actually used a blog a few years ago when I was still in a classroom of my own. In a 7th grade Business class, we were reading a fiction book with a story line based upon economic concepts.  I would pose questions to the students that they responded to on their  own. In a technology class with 11-12th grade students, I would post a current event or a news item/article and give them a prompt to jar their thinking.

The younger students had a more difficult time moving from the "isn't this cool" replies to more thoughtful responses. It took a while for students in both groups to move to the quality of answers I was hoping for. Unfortunately, I started this later in the school year and the year ended before the students had the opportunity to be comfortable with the task. I do believe that blogging with students has a lot of potential as they become more at ease with the medium.

Here I am now, a librarian, without a classroom of my own and thinking of new ways to use a blog. I have not done a personal or professional blog before because I have been waiting for the moment when I have something more interesting to say. Since I don't see myself going on a 6-month trek through Africa that I can blog about, I guess I'll have to find my material in the life of a K-12 educator.

I am going to use this "23 Things" project as a challenge to try to incorporate many things that I have only dabbled with up until now.