Dr. Strange has shown us how to blog and in the past has found few people have gone on to use blogging. The problem with that is that blogging is a tool that will make life easier for any teacher. Russ Goerend has a class set up that allows children to post essays, revise essays, and improve essays as part of his curriculum. Students, teachers, and visitors from all over the world can comment and help fuel learning with simple dialogue and fresh prospective.
This serves many purposes for the teacher willing to blog; communication with parents is fundamental to a successful student, student development, grant applications, student participation, fresh ideas, creativity, the list goes on and on. The most important thing is that it teaches everyone to be connected and figure out a solution or get advice.
What did you do before email? Before cell phones? Before television? Now you get to write about it, talk about it, and see it as easily as turning on the light. We all evolve at our own pace. but we will get to were we need to go.
I am an advocate of a laptop for every student and the only way to do this, it seems, is to make textbooks digital and accessible to all on the web. Schools are funded by property taxes and Alabama has the lowest property taxes in the nation. While this may be great for home owners and merchants, it means the schools are very underfunded in Alabama. Textbooks cost money, serious money. Paper, pencils, printing, maintenance, equipment, smart boards, all cost a huge amount of money and are not needed with a laptop.
Just today, a news article that I read on my handy dandy computer told me about Google having until Friday for a digital library settlement. At first glance I thought and presumed, that this was the sort of fuel advocates for keeping classrooms stagnant rather than fresh, would throw in my face; I mean it is a law suit issue over digitalizing textbooks. Then I read the article and it is google working with publishers and authors to settle on rights and fees associated with publishing digital textbooks from major universities and libraries around the world. "This is the future of textbooks and printed books," is the real message that the article allows you to expect in the near future.
Soon I will be able to read Hamlet on my laptop, all because I blog, and that is the answer.
To Blog or not to blog, that is the question?
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/s#a65 This link will take you to the Gutenburg Project page where you can download all of Shakespeare's work :>
ReplyDeleteI am not sure that blogging makes teaching easier, it just happens that most of the work happens before the students get busy.
As far as textbooks go, why do we need them at all. If we have internet access, we can find experts in any field or even published research. I suspect we would find much more value in having our students create their own textbooks which come to think of it is exactly what a blog is.
Mr. C
Mr. Chamberlain I could not agree more. I just posted a little blog for the College of Education at the University of South Alabama, and while there is no frills about it, I think this shows the demand or need for what every student and teacher has to move towards. I really just want to get the laptop for students so we can make major changes together. I think this would at least place the ability for technology and its benefits in the hands of every future teacher coming out of the University. One small step for the University, one giant step for education reform.
ReplyDeleteMy hope is that it shows the powers that be what students need and demand and is achieving the mission statement promised to the students entering the college. It helps that it makes fiscal sense.
Thank you for the comments and the link to the other famous writer named William.