To blog or not to blog....

If you are reading this, you’re probably like…”oh here she goes again with a resolution to blog again”.  

My husband and I recently attended an event called Nerdtacular.  We were drawn to this event by podcasters we (he mainly) listen to via our smart devices.  The Nerdtacular conference featured different live shows that these podcasters create.  Many of the attenders were podcasters themselves.  I never really realized how widespread podcasting is.  It’s like you pick a topic and find some friends to talk about that topic and then you upload it to a place where people can download it and listen to it at their leisure.  While most of the “conference “was entertaining, there was a breakout session on podcasting.  We, (my husband and I) attended this breakout session.  I was mainly interested in it as I see it as a valuable classroom tool and for the life of me, I cannot figure out why more teachers are not using it. What better way to let student review your lecture than to re-listen to it at their own pace? When the breakout session was finished, we were both really jazzed about podcasting.  However, we don’t know what to talk about and that soon fizzled our excitement.  We then discussed our blogs which I am not faithful to but my husband is a pretty avid blogger. http://nocturnecsh.blogspot.com/

  

One of the major avenues to improve teaching is reflection.  If you reflect on your practice, you can look at ways to improve what you do.  So, I suggested to my husband that we set aside time during our week to blog.  We usually have a date night on Fridays but sometimes that moves to another night because of different events.  We decided to make our date night Saturday and use Fridays for “reflection” and writing.  I have to say, he first proposed using Monday nights but I thought it would be too difficult to reflect on the first day of the week and I suggested Fridays.   So this is my first “Friday” Reflection.

I think as far as the podcasting goes, I will use the medium once school starts.  There are some on line applications that allow teachers to capture notes and post them on line for students to review.  While this is not a “podcast” in the truest sense, I gained enough knowledge from the podcasting breakout session to know I have the equipment and as the presenters kind of said “just start doing it”.

Now the blogging.  I am going to try to pick out one really good thing that happened over the week and one not so good thing and reflect on why the good thing was good and how I can improve the not so good thing.    

We will see what we will see.  Until next reflection Friday!