Things 3 and 4 - Reflection and links

Ok, this is officially my first blog post ever and I'm very nervous and a little freaked out.  It's a different feeling knowing this will be available to the world as soon as I push "publish".

The purpose of this blog is to share and reflect on my current class, "21 things for 21st century educators".  I am hoping that through this class, I will be pushed to further my technological knowledge and will become a better, more effective teacher.  The first of these two goals has already been achieved as this is my first ever blog post.  Here goes:  This week our "things" or assignments were to create a blog using blogger - check, to create our first blog post with a link to a website - in progress, and to add a gadget/widget to our blog - still to come.

I'm really excited about the articles I've read about using blogger in education.  I've already found a great professional development blog with awesome ideas for the Spanish classroom (Teaching and Learning Spanish). This blog is especially full of FREE authentic materials in Spanish.  I'm already planning on sharing this with the Spanish department.  So the first benefit that I am seeing in blogging is accessing and sharing ideas professionally.

The second idea came from a teacher's website that listed students' blogs. (Spanish blogs) This set of blogs was inspiring to me because simplicity and ease of use. The students use their blog as a diary.  I'm not sure if they do it in class or at home, but if all students had internet access at home or at some point in the school library, I foresee this being put to use in homework assignments.  It could go from a simple diary to students maintaining a blog about things that interest them in Spanish.  The topics could be theirs to choose as long as the posts were in Spanish.  I love this because then as a teacher, I can access these at home, and give automatic feedback through comments to the students, just like it shows in the Spanish blogs like above.  This would be especially beneficial because the AP exam is changing next year and will focus much more on culture.  They have 6 themes for the culture component, so each term we could work with a new theme and students could find articles, stories, videos, or even a native speaker's blog post relating to a theme, they could write a personal response to it, and post it all on the blog for me (and the world) to see.  We could link the students' blogs together, and maybe as an assignment they would need to read another student's blog posts and respond.  These would all be authentic communication spurred by authentic materials.  That's pretty exciting.