Reflections on Blogging

I have blogged before using blogger, but this was my first experience into blogging about a professional topic. Blogging about personal experiences is easier because you don’t have to look further than yourself for content or references. However, I enjoyed blogging about my topic “Thinking Outside the Math Textbook” as it is something I am passionate about. The more I searched for material, the more pages I added to my education Pinterest board. The most time-consuming aspect of this assignment was narrowing down my blog topics. There are so many activities available to apply math topics to fun and engaging activities that go well beyond worksheets. The more activities I sampled, the more I want to teach a computational thinking centered math class. I don’t know if I’ll continue to blog, at this time, but I will definitely continue to follow the multiple educational bloggers I found that appeal to my “thinking outside the math textbook” concept.

Within my future math classroom, I can definitely see using a blog to keep students and parents up to date with day to day classroom happenings. The blogs would likely include vodcasts I make demonstrating how to solve homework problems, or postings of notes made during class using the SmartBoard. A blog is a great way to save this information and reference it from year to year, adding more every year with each new class. Soon students will have a great resource full of information from their class and past classes. I like the idea of using a blog to compile this information more than using google drive or an online learning space because often the information shared within those storage spaces pertains only to one class and doesn’t offer much historical information to search and reference. If an Algebra II student needs to reference past notes they remember from my Algebra I class, it will be possible by searching the blog for past content. My future classroom will definitely have some type of online presence, organized for the benefit of all my students in all classes.