My Take on Educational Blogging

What is Educational Blogging? Educational Blogging is typically done by teachers and is a way for them to share their thoughts and ideas coming from their experience in the classroom. Many of the educational blogs that I have read tend to serve as kind of a debrief on what has been going on in that teacher's classroom that past week or so and what they have learned from it, struggled with, or what it has caused them to have to think about. Another form of educational blogging that I have seen involves teachers also setting up student blogs connected to their own so that the blog as a whole serves as a way for parents to keep up with what their students are doing in class as well as what is going on with the teacher. Blogging is a great way for students and teachers alike to be able to share their unique ideas and perspectives on a worldwide platform and to receive feedback from others who share their experiences or may have new perspectives on the content. 

A woman sitting with her legs crossed, typing on her laptop

This blog that I started was as a part of my Education Technology 486 class at the University of Tennessee and throughout this project, we were challenged to choose three topics related to education that interested us to blog about. In a class of 20+, this project left us with a lot of blog posts between us all which served as a great starting point for us to start exploring the world of Educational Blogging from the comfort of our own peers' blogs. One thing that I learned from reading my peers' blogs is just how much we are able to communicate about ourselves and our perspectives just from the design of the blog. I loved looking at different people's blogs and just seeing the stark contrast in designs, and as I read through their posts, I could really see how what age and subject they were planning on teaching was so clearly reflected in the style of their blog which further backed the information that I was reading in the posts. A great example of these design choices can be seen on Aleea's blog, with a pre-K focus, vs Haille's blog, with a geography focus. These stylistic differences also made me think about how people perceive my blog, and how the design that I choose shapes the lens that they read my posts through. Another thing that I learned is how these blogs can serve a such a sense of validation to a lot of the things that we all feel and sometimes feel alone in feeling. I really enjoyed reading Madison's Blog post on Poverty in the classroom and reading about how important intentionality is when dealing with students in adverse situations. The last thing that I learned was how powerful sharing your own experience can be in the blogging world. It can be really easy to read blog posts and just feel like information is being laid out in front of you with no connector but in all three of the blogs that I linked above, Aleea, Haille, and Madison included a personal story of how the topic that they were writing on connected to their lives and it made the content feel so much more real and applicable to my teaching journey

    For myself, I learned a lot more through this blogging assignment than I thought I was going to. To be quite frank, I was not excited about this assignment at all because writing is not typically something that I have enjoyed. I found it hard to find topics that interested me and I was dreading having to meet the word count when I felt that I really didn't have anything meaningful to say. I was surprised however how much I did have to say when the topics came naturally to me instead of feeling forced. I even ended up writing another blog post on the digital story that I made because I was excited to share my thoughts and perspectives. This project also really inspired me to think back to all of the writing assignments that I hated as a kid and think about how my perspective might have changed if it was presented more as a reflection or blog post (which may be an idea that I'm going to steal for my future classroom). Overall, I'm really glad that I started this educational blog and while I'm not promising to keep up with it for the long haul, I do think that I might have a few more posts left in me as I continue to learn more about the world of education.

My first digital story

Here you will find my very first digital story which I created as part of my EdTech 486 (Educational Technology) class during my junior spring at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. This project challenged us to explore Tennessee state educational standards and choose one to create a digital story about. 

If you're not sure exactly what a digital story is click here to learn more about them and how they are used in education, or just think about BrainPop videos or even Crash Course style videos if you're 7familiar with those titles. The standard that I chose was TN 4.MD.C.7, which states that students will be able to,

"Recognize angle measure as additive. When an angle is decomposed into non-overlapping parts, the angle measure of the whole is the sum of the parts. Solve addition and subtraction problems to find unknown angles on a diagram in real-world and mathematical problems (e.g., by using an equation with a symbol for the unknown angle measure)."

In my digital story, you will see that we review this standard by following "Mary" through a real-world problem where the blueprint for her new slide is missing an angle measurement which she must find. I put this digital story together through a set of royalty-free images that I found on the website Pixabay as well as images that I created myself using Canva (a site that I recommend all creative people become familiar with!). After gathering my images and finalizing my storyline and script I was able to use the free video editing software that was included on my computer (Microsoft images) to create the video and overlay the background music and voice-over. When you watch my video, you will also see that I have included captions, which were a requirement of the project. This as well as image descriptions for each frame of the video were important in ensuring that the content that we created was accessible for students of all ability levels.

Before starting this project, I was honestly quite skeptical of how I was going to be able to turn a math standard into a digital story and was unsure if digital stories would end up being a helpful resource to have in my arsenal of teaching tools but now at the end of my project, I am so glad that I was able to work through all of the steps of putting this together because it gave me a whole new perspective on how technology can be used to enhance students learning. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a super tech-y person. If I can do it in person or with pen and paper, I will always choose that option but during the Covid-19 pandemic, this was not always an option, and being in a completely virtual world really made me question if I was in a classroom right now, if I would be able to adapt to the position. If you're familiar with the SAMR model of technology integration, I know know that this hesitation is because I viewed technology as a substitution or augmentation rather than a tool to modify and redefine education. Once I got into creating this lesson, I really began to understand how helpful a format like this could be for students who like to learn independently, students who have a hard time focusing for long periods of time, or even just to serve as a quick reminder for students on a concept.