Late Night Update-Well, For a Teacher During the School Year

I don't usually post this late at night. Anyone who knows me knows I'm in bed by 8:30. Tonight was the Twitter chat on student blogging and I would say it went pretty well. My HootSuite was giving me some problems so I didn't get to say everything I wanted but oh well! 

So now I'm still awake. With student blogging on my mind I started thinking about my own students' blogs. Where do I want to take them? What's going to be our next step? We have commentary down. My kids are responding to their peers with some really good stuff. We did a Socratic Seminar over The Giver the other day and I had them extend their conversations to the blog. I was impressed for sure!

The question remains- where do we go from here? I guess the next step is to take the blogs so they extend their audience reach and learn about readers and how to follow blogs. If I could get my students on Blogger we might be able to work it out. We might even be able to have real linky parties!

At this point I have even more in my head than I started with and will turn in for the night and probably dream about all this!

Oh It's Been So Long!

It has truly been forever since I posted. I had no idea just how busy I would be this year and how exhausted I would also be. Even though I haven't posted, I've been thinking daily of what I would say about this year. There have been many successes and some failures. Let's do a recap:

Successes:

• Blogging! Oh yes indeed. I'm excited to say that my students have taken to this and are getting the hang of it (finally!). I introduced it in phases. All of our students at our school are participating in the 25 Books Campaign (reading 25 books throughout the year). I had them in phase one just post book summaries of those books to receive credit. Then we would meet one on one about the book to talk. Phase two, which is where we are, I introduced a Weekly Blogging Schedule and Commentary Guidelines. Now I opened the blog up for anything my   students wanted to blog about and they had to provide commentary to one another. The commentary is exciting to see! Our superintendent has even been checking out the blogs and really liked one and wants to use it. For what? I'm still not really clear on that but it was so exciting to tell my student that her blog is being used by our superintendent as a model.
• Connecting with my students via Twitter and Instagram- Pictures that I take of them working and anchor charts that we create are posted to Twitter and Instagram. Parents mainly utilize Twitter and my students are all over Instagram. Bases covered!

Failure:

• Theres really just one right now and that is that I'm wearing myself out. I have to take some breaks and find time to not think about work and do work. There have been a couple of times these past couple of weeks that I've reached a breaking point or was close to a breaking point.

It sure does feel good to be back to blogging. It's been a long time. Hopefully, I'll be able to continue writing on a weekly basis. I think for my mental state I will need it. 

If anyone is interested in being part of a Twitter chat on student blogging in the classroom, I'll be moderating a chat on Tuesday (10/29) starting at 8:30. Search #nisdnov8. I'd love to have you part of the chat!