At the Teacher's Desk

At the Teacher's Desk Blog

At the Teacher's Desk blog is a collaboration of several teachers that is maintained in a blog format. Wm Chamberlain maintains this blog as well as his own classroom blog. At the Teacher's Desk is a blog that features thoughts and ideas that others want to share with their fellow educators.

I read several of the posts on the blog as well as followed the various links and comments that others have made. I read through the Fundred Project and watched the video. It will be interesting to follow the idea and see if it turns out over time to bring about change in the New Orleans area. The blog provides an outlet to gain exposure to people that might be interested in helping with the cause.

Other topics on the blog covered were to how to grow and maintain visitors to your blog. Chamberlain offers several ways to help your blog succeed. Maintain the same blog address in order to build support over time. You need to be consistent with posting blogs, so that people will have a reason to come back and check your blog again. Use titles in your posts that represent your main idea. Using good titles will allow those that are searching for the information on search engines such as google to find your information. Be sure that you are a supporter of the blogs you read. Leave worthwhile comments to the poster and make appropriate links so that others can build off of the information left there.

Some of the other posts addressed important issues such as building a positive digital portfolio. We need to address the importance to our young people of the importance in maintaining their images even on social networking sites. This is something that hasn't needed to be addressed until recently. Young people don't often think before they speak and write and with all the new social networking sites, they need to learn the importance of those comments following them. I think as an educator using technology, this should be one of the pressing issues that we have in the forefront of minds while educating students in technology.

One of the last posts that I visited was the post by teachernz. The post was titled, Getting over it! The YouTube video addressed getting over our personal issues with technology. This really hit home with me as we enter in to the final stretch of our course. The thoughts of watching ourselves on video, listening to ourselves in a podcast, and putting ourselves out there in front of others is somewhat unnerving. We have to learn to get over our personal issues in order to help others work with technology. If we aren't willing do things ourselves, it will be hard to teach our students the benefits of these advances.