just what the world needs….

another blog! (?)

yes, it’s finally time for me to start my personal blog. I’ve been itching to do it for a while, but haven’t taken the time.

Why is now any different? This semester I’m teaching two courses in Language Arts/Writing to future elementary and middle school teachers. Over my past semesters of teaching and learning, I’ve become an avid reader of blogs and have seen many examples of blogs used by students and teachers to enrich their educational practice. At the same time, I’ve become frustrated with the limitations and structures of course management systems and the like. So, with all that coming together, it was time to blog – for me, and for my students. I try never to give my students an assignment that I wouldn’t find valuable myself, so here I am, blogging along with them.

I’ll be adding to the “about me” page as the semester goes on, but I am guessing, as has been the case with my former students, that you’ll get to know more “about me” through my writing and thinking here than from any kind of thumbnail sketch I’d put together over there. I will keep the “about me” page, in case anyone stopping by needs a quick and dirty idea of what I’m doing here, but I’m guessing the topics will range far and wide. I’m sure I’ll talk about literacy and libraries, about my family and my students, about pieces I’m reading and about how I am developing as a researcher and as a teacher. I almost named this blog “both and” because I tend to refuse it when people ask me to choose either one thing or another. Instead, if someone were to ask me if I am a literacy person or a library person, a teacher or a researcher, I’d say I am all of those, plus a bunch of other things they forgot to mention. I refuse to decide, to boil it down to one thing, to favor one identity over the others. I am a web, a constellation.

I could go on but I’m going to keep it pretty short, as I’ve asked my students to do in their blog posts. I’ll share some of the other guidelines I suggested to them as time goes on, as well as some of the other parts of life that intrigue me. I’m happy to tell you that I am learning as I go.

In closing, I’ll welcome 53 new blogging teachers to the blogosphere this week. (And I count myself among that group as well, so call me #54.) It’s exciting to see so many bright young teachers develop an online presence and share their thinking in a different way. I’m already inspired.  Even with all the blogs in the blogosphere, I think that 54 more blogging teachers just might very well be what the world needs.