Adventures By Design

This is all a whole lot more stressful that I imagined. Here I am with a shiny new WordPress blog, and I don’t know what to put in it. I have a few ideas, but all of them are overshadowed by the fact that I just don’t know what I want. As this is my second blog, and the first one got abandoned pretty quickly, the smart money is betting that this whole discussion is moot and in a month or so none of this will exist except in some random server’s cache file.

Idea #1:
I could make this a personal blog about my less-than-extraordinary life. Basically an online diary, I could talk about all the idea, hope, dreams, and fears that I have. I could even begin each post with “Dear Diary” and end with “Love Richard XOXO” or other such drivel. While that may satisfy my ego, I doubt it would be very interesting for others to read.

Idea #2:
I want a place to think about my teaching and learning practice. When asked how to become a better teacher, most of the teachers I most admire and respect recommend writing daily journal reflections. Daily! I’m not sure I can keep that up, but it seems like a good idea. But I have a few unanswered questions: first, what about protecting privacy? Of course I would change any students’ names, but what if a student or teacher that I work with discovers all the juicy and potentially embarrassing things I say about them? It wouldn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out who’s who. Ok, so then would I need to become so inventively cryptic as to essentially recreate an alternate classroom, with alternate students in it? Or should I generalize so the actual names and situations are never positively identifiable?

Idea #3
I would like to use a blog in my classroom, as a classroom blog. At my current school, teachers are provided with a message board that most of us write on every day. It takes only a few minutes and it is a good way to communicate with parents. Unfortunately, it uses decade old technology, and only supports images, links, fonts, etc. if you know how to code in HTML (and have the time and patience to bother). Definitely not Web 2.0.

My classroom also has a wiki that we’ve been adding to with qualified success for the past year. I think with the right motivation and coaching, many of my students would embrace a blog. Yesterday I found an inspiring blog by a grade one class in Moose Jaw, Canada. Unfortunately, we have only a few more weeks of school and then the year is over, and I am leaving both the school and the country that it is in. So far, I have no idea where I am going to go, so I can’t even imagine and prepare for my future students because I have no idea who or where or how old they are, or what we will be studying together.

Well those are the big ideas that occur to me at this time. If anyone actually reads this (which is unlikely as virtually no one know this blog exists), leave some comments if you have any.