Blogging: DC & the Importance of Respect

To me, one of the most important things to remember when you are blogging is that everyone has different ideas and opinions. While it OK for me to disagree with someone, I still need to remember to respect their opinion.

When we share our own ideas with other people it often helps us understand that idea in a better way. By describing what we think about something we often have to think about other perspectives that are out there. When someone disagrees with my opinion, it often makes me think of other ideas, or perspectives. Sometimes its hard to take/read/listen to other opinions but I need to remember that it’s ok for others to disagree and that we’re all entitled to share our own thinking.

It would be great to get some feedback from this post. I am working with a group of grade 4 students and we are learning about the purpose of comments and engaging with other people's blog posts.

I wonder how other people feel when their ideas are challenged?

Networking Works! But how do we get more interactions?

In the past year, I have been trying to network as much as possible. I have tried to do this for a couple of reasons...

1) To share some of the awesome work I am a part of in our building. The power of sharing has really shown itself to be powerful for me. It confirms that we are a doing some great in our building and also is great to get some feedback from other educators. I also believe we do not have enough sharing of great resources and ideas that work within our system.

2) To get to know as many of the great people around me in our huge organization. After applying for jobs last year, I realized I knew no-one. To get my name out there and be known, I have come to realize I need to know people. For career development I think this is crucial. I don't want to rely on getting lucky (or unlucky for that matter) in my next job, I want to be in control of where I work next.

Twitter Handle - @stevewclark

Utilizing Twitter as a networking tool has showed me the benefits of networking. What is weird to me, is that it's been easier to network with people around the world than the people that are geographically close to me and work for the same public school board.

Area III Learning Commons Collaborative Blog

My blogs have been great to do the first of the above examples of networking. However, a lot of the time I don't get any feedback from people that read or browse my blog posts. It would be great to see the comments come in and get more interaction. To do this, I think I need to increase the amount of people that actually visit the blog to start with. Maybe over time the interactivity will increase. Maybe teachers in general don't like to comment and leave feedback. I wish this would happen more so the conversation can continue past the point of one person sharing.

Marlborough Mobile Learning (iPad Blog)

I have never enjoyed my work as much as I do now. Getting to know a ton of new people and having great conversations about learning has played a big part in my enjoyment of teaching. I look forward to the future conventions and interactions we have.