Blogs I Read

 

There are many benefits to reading education blogs. It makes us think often times about things we take for granted, helps us share ideas and allow us to express our views about certain topics. It is obvious therefore how this can positivily help us as educators. While reflecting  and reading Vicki Davis’ blog, I had the opportunity of viewing a couple other blogs. Free Technology for teachers, 21^st  Century Learning and This week in Education.

In “free technology for teachers, http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/09/braingle-brain-teasers-trivia-and-games.html I learned about Braingle and that it could be a good resource for students to use to practice vocabulary words. There were also other Braingle activities could be useful for educational fun during those few minutes of downtime that teachers sometimes find in the course of a day. I tried some of the quizzes and they were quite fun and pretty straight forward and would be applicable for teachers in especially core subjects. There are questions in a variety of subject areas as well.

The 21^st   Century learning blog while very long, I found an aspect relating to PLP that was interesting and why as professionals it was important to be a part of it. It outlined that fact that through PLP,  we are gaining exposure to the world that our kids already live in easily. The writer pointed out that being a part of this new 21^st century form of learning requires openness to new experiences and letting-go of tradition-based ideas of what schooling is. http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog/

Finally I looked at the blog “This week in education on the topic of Black Male Graduation Rate http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/ . The blog speaks about the graduation rate of our Black males in comparison to their White counterparts, the data is sad, American Black males have a graduation rate of 47% compared to a White male graduation rate of  78%.; and it gets worst in cities like Detroit which had one of the worst Black male graduation rates, 27%.  Their graduation rate for young White males was even worse, at 19%, further illustrating the damage done to "relegate" minorities regardless of skin color. Other major cities like New York are also mentioned. I was saddened by the data and can’t help but question that as educators are we really doing all we can to help these students?

I must say while I found these interesting, it was quite time consuming to go through and read, hence a disadvantage of reading these blogs. As it relates to aggregator like Google Reader or Google Sites to collect updates from blogs, I believe its good to have these RSS feeds like Google reader, almost everything online has one and with the many features, it’s just another way to utilize technology in sharing ideas.