In blogging for education reform, Greta Sandler and I have collaborated together on an initiative we believe represents what education needs, bloggers for education! The project is Blog 4 Edu (The Blogging for Education project), a Twitter account (@Blog4Edu), wiki, and Facebook page to help support bloggers, blogging projects, and blogging challenges. Our vision is to persuade as many educational stakeholders worldwide to blog as possible.
Why Blog 4 Edu?
We suggest that blogging and social media are two of the main components of improving education worldwide. This won’t fix everything in education but through blogging we can open the conversation to the possibilities. When we blog we open the conversation to all education stakeholders (the public, parents, students, administrators, and educators). We automatically get an audience for our message even if it initially consists of one. Eventually, we share our message and reach someone who joins the conversation of how to improve education worldwide. This conversation continues for as long as we participate in the conversation.
Supporting Each Other
Teachers can choose to make a difference in their classrooms each day so why don’t many choose to inspire a passion for learning within their students? Many teachers don’t feel supported. Somewhere along the way their vision of reaching their students became blurred by the restraints of standardized tests, burdens from administration, parental complaints, and lack of support. Several educators also don’t reflect or run ideas with other educators about improving their practice. We lose so many great teachers because we fail to support them. After they lose their initial vision they also begin to lose their passion.
Blogging can be difficult at first, so we decided to start Blog 4 Edu to support, encourage and inspire edubloggers. Blog 4 Edu is meant to provide that support through commenting, sharing blogging resources, inspiring posting through blogging challenges, and providing bloggers with several projects to collaborate on. We won’t be initiating these projects. Instead, we will be sharing the ones many educators have already started and hope to inspire a collaborative spirit and enthusiasm for participating. Often educators come up with innovative ideas that die because of a lack of support and participation. With over 50,000 educators in our various social networks, there are plenty of participants but the word just doesn’t get spread. We hope to help spread that word.
Spreading the Word
Through blogging students and teachers exemplify what works in education. Blogging is a great way to share what is happening in every classroom. Transparency is very important to education transformation. The general public and parents need to see what we are doing in our classrooms. Through blogs we can share videos, share why we believe in our instructional practices, and share our humanity. We share our successes and failures and for parents and the public to read our raw reflections reminds them we are not superheroes, we are passionate individuals wanting to improve the world by inspiring children to love to learn. Transformation starts in the classroom but builds through the spreading of our message. Blogging is a great way to share what is happening in every classroom. Moreover, educators can also get other educational stakeholders on board by sharing their successes. Let’s spread the word and passion and make it contagious.
Reflection
Every passionate teacher should be a lifelong learner. Learning and reflecting will inspire and motivate teachers. Blogging is a wonderful tool for educators to reflect on their practices and grow professionally and personally. Through reflection we are able to improve on our instructional methods.
Ending Thoughts
We both believe that something must be done. We can’t just sit down and wait for other people to do something. We decided the way to best exemplify education transformation was through collaborating on this blog post and on this project. By the way, Greta Sandler is located in Argentina and I am located in Germany. We met on Twitter about 4 months ago and came up with Blog 4 Edu yesterday. This is the power of collaboration! This is how we believe transformation will happen!
Find out more about this exciting project:
- Blog 4 Edu Wiki
- Twitter account (@Blog4Edu)
- Blog 4 Edu Facebook page
This post has been cross-posted by Greta Sandler at About a Teacher!
Challenge:
Follow the blogs on the @Blog4Edu account or join in one of the projects!
