After reading my original posting from last Fall (2010) about the potential of using a blog to reflect on my experiences in my PDS and the Five-Year Program, I have come to understand why keeping a blog will be a useful tool in the near future when I am a full time teacher. It will allow me to keep track of my ideas and share my ideas and problems with other teachers in the hopes of receiving advice as well as sharing my advice with others. I think the most effective thing a blog can do for reflection on practice is that it allows us to receive feedback from other people. I think the blogs we have created can be more useful if the whole Benedum Program used it and all our assignments were posted on our blog.
I think it is important to hear about what our classmates are doing in their PDS’s because we are all at different schools with different students, it is nice to see how the schools around our area are different, even though they are only a few miles away from each other. Being able to share my blog with my seminar facilitator and PDS faculty would allow me to address issues and ideas that I have in an easy way. I think it would be a good idea to have us write about a certain issue we have come across in our PDS and then get the opinions of the people who have access to our blogs. I would find it useful to use our blogs to talk about lessons we have taught, this way we can share our ideas with our peers. Not only can we share information and ideas with our peers, but we can also reflect on what we do ourselves. Having all our reflections conveniently located in one spot instead of on paper would help with organization. We would be able to keep our reflections all in one area and go to specific reflections on lessons before we teach that lesson again.
Some things that I think would be useful involving our blog would be to post actual lessons we have done, along with our reflection on the lesson. Doing this would allow our partners, seminar facilitator, and PDS faculty to see our ideas and what we think about our lessons. I also think it would be cool if we had access to the blogs of everyone in our class that way we can read other people’s blog and we aren’t so limited. It would be nice to have others read our ideas and have them comment on them too. I think for our blog to be most effective it needs to be used more throughout the semester.
Question: What is your favorite thing about having a blog for the Benedum Program?
I agree with a lot of your points made about our reflection on practice through the five-year program. Hearing about other students experiences in different schools would show us how diverse teaching really is and how each group of students are different. I think using our blog more throughout the semester is a good idea because we can develop more as a teacher this way. My favorite part about having a blog for the Benedum program is sharing our thoughts, concerns, and ideas about experiences we are having within our PDS’s and collaborating together on becoming teachers. I think it’s important to hear other voices and opinions on topics that we can learn from and start to develop our own understandings. Seeing our own reflections, along with others are very beneficial to our teachings because it’s a way for us to see what went well and what needs changed. I hope to continue reading your blogs and hearing about your experiences in the classroom!
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