You are Never Alone

For me this has definitely been the year of the blog. I try to post on my two main blogs every day.

Over on my personal crime fiction blog I have written over 300 posts this year, more than one a day. Around me I have a community of bloggers whom I am in weekly, if not daily, touch with. I monitor their blogs and some of them monitor mine. One of the continuing discussions has been about the rise of “amateur” book reviewers, where bloggers who review books appear to be filling the void being created by the reduction in the number of newspapers employing journalists to review books.

On You Are Never Alone I have also posted on an almost daily basis. Like many other educators I monitor the blogs of others, in an attempt to keep up with new ideas, new tools, and new stories.

Today in one of my Google Alerts I came across the following:

The Rise of Teacher Bloggers
Though still apparently dismissed by some administrators as the online equivalent of “faculty bathroom graffiti” (huh?), teacher blogs are becoming increasingly influential in the education community and beyond, according to an article in U.S. News and World Report. Many teacher blogs—there are as many as 6,000, according to Technorati.com—are now being read not just by other teachers but by parents, elected officials, and policy wonks, the article notes.

They “raise important issues and give the rest of us a peek into a world that we see and hear about very rarely or only anecdotally through the media,” said Alexander Russo, an education writer who blogs at This Week in Education.

By nature of their occupation, teacher bloggers often find they have to walk a fine line between freedom of expression and discretion, but most don’t seem deeply bothered by the tradeoff.

Bill Ferriter, a well-respected 6th grade teacher in North Carolina, says he spends four hours every week working on his blog The Tempered Radical, and another hour every morning reading education blogs. For him, blogging is a way to discuss ideas with colleagues across the country and have a voice in education policy. Blogging, he says, is “the great equalizer.”

One of our most successful edna Groups this year has been Blogging Corner which I have referred to often in this blog.

Blogging Corner is a place for bloggers, would-be bloggers, and blogging mentors. Whether you are just starting out on your blogging journey, are some distance along the track, or have loads of experience, we hope there will be something here for you.

The growing number of teacher bloggers is a part of the grass roots authoring being enabled by web 2.0 tools, whether it is in video, podcasting, or blogging. In ways that just weren’t possible before, the voices of educators are being heard, and communities of interest are growing. Teachers are using the tools to reflect on their own practice, mentor each other, compare notes, and comment on the systems in which they work.
Much of this is being done in their own time, but it will be interesting to see if organisations take this on board: if they recognise that this form of communication can not only be reflective and cathartic for the individual, but a powerful professional development tool, a support mechanism for teachers who feel, and perhaps are, isolated, and an enabler of progress and the development of new competencies.

In the article that I quoted from, the author also commented on how teacher blogs can give parents and the general community an insight into what is important to teachers and what is happening in their classrooms. Blogs could replace newsletters for example, especially if comment enabled, and be instrumental in raising the parental involvement in the life of their schools.
The problem then may become another one: if systems, organisations, schools provide a blogging tool for teachers, will there then be an expectation that they use them: that blogging will become part of what they do everyday? Will a vibrant, thoughtful blog be a requirement for promotion into policy making positions? We’ll see.

There’s a version of this on blip.tv