Reflections on Teaching

It was the first week back after Spring Break, so I did not keep good track of where I went and commented on blogs, at all. It’s all sort of a blur. Part of it was a very grinding after school schedule, the culmination of which was a podcasting training I did in my lab for teachers in my district. Strangely it ended up being the emotional fulcrum for the week, and kept me from posting to my blog, and commenting on others (something I’ll touch on in my next post).

The group was very kind, and had lots of positive things to say. I have tried to tell people in the past, “Hey, drop me an email if you have any more questions,” and sometimes I hear from someone, but I would really like to build up a network in my district and to stay in touch with folks after trainings. I finally bit the bullet, and made a blog to support the trainings I’m doing…

Alice Mercer’s PD Blog

It has my schedule, because people often express an interest in attending future trainings, AND it has an email subscription on it. I had some teachers who missed this training from my site, because they forgot about it. I told them, sign up and you’ll be sent an email a week before my next training. It’s also nice to have a place to post links, and materials I left out of the training that turn out to be relevant.

I was feeling a little defeated after seeing this post:

Creative Spaces – Nurturing Our Need to Create Pt 1 | A Storybook Life from fellow In Practice blogger, Michaele Sommerville, thinking how junky my house has gotten and I have no creative space, but then I thought about my online projects, and the care and devotion that I give them, and I felt a little better.

Rounding out the week was Diigo frezy. I’ve been using Diigo for at least a year, and have tried to get others to join me (the backbone of this and most of my posts are built in Diigo). It’s a really great “swiss army knife” application: lots of tools in one place. Finally, with the release of version 3, the edublogosphere has found Diigo. I say welcome aboard. I shared some of what I have learned in the last year at an online sessions Lisa Parisi did at Classroom 2.0 Live. You can see and read about it here:

Lisa’s Lingo