Thing 13- Blogging

I enjoyed viewing all of the professional educators blogs.  They gave me ideas about what a legitimate blog should look like and what is popular in today's blogging world.

As I'm sure I could have concluded, popular blogs include videos and photos not just text.  One thing I've learned from my students since I started teaching our school's Yearbook course, is that students are developing a shorter attention span when reading social media and blogs.  Getting my students to write captions for pictures was like pulling teeth.  They aren't even the Instagram era anymore, where there was at least a sentence with the picture, now they are the Snapchat era where there is no text supporting the photo.
The point I'm making is that some of these blogs are very wordy and I'm not sure kids would enjoy reading them.  They are good for adults, but I think the majority of students would rather watch a video or look at picture directions than read a page of explanation.

I enjoyed looking at Dan Meyer's blog, I've followed him in the past, and he gives great examples of how to do math with real world examples.  He also loves to "tear apart" old text books language, and rewrite the questions to me more progressive and thought provoking.

The blog "Cool Cat Teacher" was more broad to all types of teachers, giving cool tips, ways to raise money, ways to improve your classroom environment, etc.  I liked this blog and will continue to follow both of these blogs.

One of the Curated Resources I really liked was the "SmartBrief on EdTech."  This resource shared "10 Takeaways from #ISTE2016 conference in Denver, and each of these are suggestions that could be laminated and put above every teachers desk.  One of my favorites being "When students bring their passions and insights to the table, they become "creators and not just consumers of ideas and technologies produced by others."  This is very applicable to my classes.

Thanks!