Response to an Edublogger

Now I must admit, I did not think that shyness was a character trait of mine.  But I found the task of replying to an Edublogger to be surprisingly nerve wracking.  I think in a lot of ways I just felt like to much of a newbie, maybe even a bit like an impostor.  Who am I to comment on their experience rich posts?  The experience that I have to draw from feels laughable outside of our program.

However I bit the bullet and did it anyway, and while I found the commenting part slightly painful, digging through the posts of other teachers.  I think that was the most valuable part for me, scrolling through and skimming (because frankly I did not have time to deeply read all the bloggers sites that I visited) countless blogs, just to get an idea of what was out there.

I ended up commenting on two blogs, that while well written and helpful, were not stand out posts by any means, just posts that I think that I will be able to come back to in the future.  The first post that I commented on was about how to get ready for a first day of school.  The advise ranged from the mental preparedness of just simply being positive to the procedural aspects like setting up classroom norms on the first day of school.  I liked this post because it was practical little things that I would be able to do to have a better first day of school, it was nothing overwhelming or complicated.

The second blog post that I commented on was a simple post from a teacher in California about an activity that he did during the week prior to the standardized tests.  It seemed to be a requirement at his school to give his students time to review and prepare for these tests.  The jigsaw activity that he did seemed like a great way for him to judge student understanding and allow students to be teaching other students.

While there were plenty of interesting posts about big ideas and important talking points, I chose to comment on these posts because they were things that I could put in place in my own classroom.  I don't have tons of time now, but reading ideas that other teachers have through blogs is a practice that I would really like to continue in the future!