Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Student Mind, Blogger's Mind

This year students and educators around the country will be blogging, or starting to do so. Wrapped up in this blogging is the axiom of "teachers as lifelong learners." In the midst of learning what embedding, tagging, quoting, and auto-posting are, perspective can be obscured or even lost. Here's a recommendation; get help - join a community. It's quite common to see millennial or digital native students posting pleas for help on a variety of sites. If the students now are becoming more comfortable asking for help so should their educators. Any activity that requires the educator to simultaneously become a learner gains an additional level of credence. 

Kelly Tenkely has a great post on the necessity of blogging for educators. Here's a money-quote: 

Blog posting is good for teachers. It keeps us humble, reminds us of how scary it can be to "speak" in front of the class. It reminds us of what it feels like not to have all the right answers. How it feels to get your work back with red marks all over it, exposing your faults. 

It brings back Suzuki's concept of Zen mind being the beginner's mind. If blogging can return educators to a student's mindset, it is compelling evidence for the necessity of blogging in the classroom. 

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