Week 3 Reflection: Blogging Philosophy Statement

This week's professional development activity is to develop a "blogging philosophy statement." When I began the Web 2.0 class last summer, we were asked to begin a blog for personal reflections. I avoided starting a professional and personal reflection blog by instead creating a class blog for my ESL math intervention classes. So now I find myself reading other educators' blogs and considering my audience, purpose, and goals for both this blog and my new class blog.

Some of the top educator blogs given as recommended reading this week were familiar to me: some were blogs I already visit and some were from people I have started to follow on Twitter. I enjoy reading Twitter posts from @coolcatteacher and @tombarrett, and I got to investigate their ideas more in-depth on their respective blogs. Most of their Twitter posts are links to useful Web 2.0 applications for like-minded educators. With a blog post, though, they can still link to useful sites with social bookmarking tools, or reflect on a workshop, or consider the pros and cons of a web app, or question the meaning of life. The things that are hard to do in 140 characters or less. The audience for the blogs are mainly educators, but not at all limited to classroom teachers. As I read posts by educators, I could find comments by other classroom teachers, administrators, software engineers, students, and more. Which brings me to my point...

My blogging philosophy statement.

Why blog? I blog to communicate. On my professional blog, I try to share some ideas for other teachers to take and use for themselves. On my class blog, I update the content and language objectives (TEKS and ELPS) daily, along with recap/preview of class activities, links, and assignments. Students and parents can view summaries of the days activities, see homework assignments, connect to the home access point for grades, and find reteach/tutoring links for problem areas. Students and parents are the primary audience, but the blog also serves to communicate to administrators and fellow teachers, "This is what we are doing." (Disclaimer: I have to provide our school with a website anyway ;) In many ways, a wiki would be a much better way to communicate and collaborate with teachers, especially teachers at my own school. This would require some cooperation, though, and the blog does not.

I blog to reflect. A reflective teacher is an effective teacher. And as @loonyhiker describes in her fantastic post, Contributing to the Conversation, the more you blog and interact online, the conversations, questions, and answers help you formulate your philosophies, reflect on teaching practices, and feel "comfortable in your own skin." I need a structure and an impetus to my reflection, or I may avoid it altogether. You might even say I blog to remember. I like the idea of reflecting on one entire year of teaching, and my first as a "regular" classroom teacher. I feel I have not been a very reflective teacher in my first two years, and hope to reflect and adjust teaching practices as the year (and years) goes by from here on out.