This blog, the Class of Ambrose,was created by a 5th grade teacher at a school in Detroit. I took the time to look through this blog mostly because it came from a Michigan school in a grade I am interested in teaching. This teacher has clearly made good use of this blog to provide his students with information and resources to benefit their learning. Some of the early posts provide information for both students and parents with clear instructions on how to use blogs, along with links to other important technology. For example the teacher posted a link and instructions for families to download Firefox for their computers. Other things I liked about this blog were the posts announcing upcoming test dates and project due dates with study information included, descriptions of the GLCEs for 5th grade and the applicable GLCE for each topic they studied, and YouTube videos of lessons he had done in class for students to re-watch should they need a refresher on the material covered. I like how he lets his students know so much about the GLCEs and lets them see exactly which GLCEs they are covering in class and when. The YouTube videos seem to be a particularly useful tool for math, giving students the opportunity to see a math lesson a second time. He also provides his students with other math help resources.
The next blog, Simply Teaching, is written by a New Hampshire 4th grade teacher, posting his experiences in teaching and providing advice and ideas to other teachers. He focuses a lot of his posts around ideas for teaching that meant to be simple, but useful and effective. He provides price and product information from Amazon.com for many of the resources he uses, his goal being to show items that teachers can get for their classrooms that are less expensive. Other posts provide reviews of books he has used in his classroom, both resource books for teachers and fiction and non-fiction books for students. I really liked this aspect of his blog, since I'm always interested in other opinions about good books for children at the grade level I hope to teach. I find that blogs are great places to get the word out about good books, both in education and in general. This is definitely a good blog to check out for ideas on many aspects of teaching.
7 years ago
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Hi Lauren! I read your post, which was really interesting. I too found a few blogs where teachers had posted the students assignments and future projects on the page. Some things I didn't see that sound like great ideas from your findings are posting links about how to use blogger. I didn't even think about the fact that a lot of these parents have probably never used a blog before...it would be kinda nice to know how to use it. Also, the teachers posted the GLCE's for that grade on the blog. What a good idea! A lot of parents don't know how to access that kind of information and it will be really helpful to them to have those materials so easily accesible on the teachers blog page. See you in class tuesday!
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