Week 4: Thing 9

Unfortunately, this isn't a very "organic" exercise. You have to really surf and stumble across information on the web. Searching for it cold turkey rarely yields any results. I have found that most educational information on the web is either 1) for elementary education 2) out of date 3) not very helpful. I have recently done some searching for information on Beowulf to enhance my teaching of the book. I have found a few decent resources that are set up as lesson plans or links to interesting articles. However, very little of what I use day to day in the classroom would relate to what could be found on newsfeeds and blogs. Even when I have students use current events in class, that is done using research materials and search engines. Using a RSS to hope that a relevant article will appear.

In reference to these particular links, the Google engine looked to be the most helpful. The one called "Edublog" looked to be the most promising, but it turned out to be out of date by three years and consisted largely of big awards announcements, but very little in the way of actual information.

I think establishing communities of blogs for teachers would possibly be helpful if you knew that you had time and were working on similar projects as other teachers. For instance, if there was a running blog for teachers who are currently teaching Beowulf to share their ideas, that may be helpful. However, once again this doesn't seem to be an organic or realistic exercise because of our time constraints as teachers.