Category Archives: blogs

What I’m Reading

Here are some blogs that have influenced me lately:

Ira Socol’s SpeEdChange Ira writes about radical changes needed in education rooted in a historical perspective. He shows how many things we do are rooted in history to prepare students for industrial society instead of for today.

John Spencer get two nods Musings from a not so Master Teacher  A blog about all kinds of educational thoughts from his classroom to ed. policy and Pencil Integration an excellent satire of technology integration.

Shelly Blake-Plock TeachPaperless  Blogs about using technology seamlessly to go “paperless” and focus on student-centered learning.

Silvia Martinez Generation Yes Blog Her latest few posts about “tinkering” in the classroom really have me thinking.

Russ Goerend Learning is Life ELA teacher blogging about his classroom and education in general.

Matt McTownsley  MeTa Musings A high school math teacher blogging about standards based grading.

 Joe Power’s For the Love of Learning Just discovered this blog about abolishing grades and focusing on student learning instead.

And I will add one “big name” to the list because of the creative and important crowdsourcing project he is organizing right now Will Richardson  Weblogg-ed

So check them out and add them to your RSS feed.

Parent Conferences Using a Computer

This week is parent teacher conferences. My new plan for this year is to use my laptop to show parents the student blogs and our class wiki. We have our conferences in the gym so I had our IT department get me a 25 foot cable to connect to the internet through the gym closet. I am excited to try this format for conferences.

My gut feeling is that many of the parents do not know or have not looked at their student’s blogs. The other thing that all teachers are doing is passing out “business cards.” The cards are color printouts of our names, e-mails, and class blogs or wikis. Again we are trying to get parents to visit the sites since this is the first year that we have all created them.

Has anyone else done this or something similar? How did it go for you?