C4T #1

"Primary Tech"

My assigned blog teacher is Kathleen Morris. Her blog is called Primary Tech. She is based out of Victoria, Australia. She was recently on maternity leave, so the first post I read was from July. That post was called “Blogging and the Literacy Curriculum.” This blog focused on how important it is to incorporate multimedia into the classroom. She explained, “I have used whole class, small group and rotation structures to make blogging work in my classroom.” Blogs cannot just be an add-on, but needs to be integrated into the curriculum. She tells her reason for thinking this, “Our students need to become transliterate and develop the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media, both traditional and digital.” Ms. Morris encourages that transliteracy becomes a daily activity in the classroom.

"Tips for Graduate Teachers"

There was a housekeeping post on the second time I went to comment, but she linked the readers to another blog she wrote recently. The blog was about Tips for Graduate Teachers. I loved this post she wrote. This post was to help the future graduating teachers and how to navigate through their classroom their first couple weeks. Her first headline in this post was Students, under this topic she encourages the teacher to really focus on getting to know the students. Kathleen even says, “Place getting to know your students above everything else.” How true is that? That we are building teacher-student relationships throughout the year and that is how we impact our classroom. During the process of building relationships she explains, “that we need to maintain a professional approach.”

Another topic she talked about was “Wider Education Community.” This headline was introducing the future teachers that our networking tools are not just the other teachers at the school we are in, but that we have other tools. These tools are twitter, blogs, and just a vast amount of knowledge on the internet. The more diverse my teacher network is the more tools I have to build a better classroom.