Thing 3

I love reading about teachers' experiences, their honest opinions and the best and worst about teaching kids. The hero teacher stories can be inspiring in small quantities, but more relevant interesting to me are the stories about good teachers doing the best job they can given their circumstances, those who aren't afraid to talk about their failures as well as their successes and the various small absurdities of what we do on a daily basis.

I'd enjoy doing something similar, but I'd be worried about my identity leaking. I'm pretty sure that even if teacher blogs include positive events, unvarnished reality is not the type of publicity that most district administrators are looking for. Protecting individual students' identities would also be a concern. I can think of a variety of happenings from the past week alone that were I to describe them, anyone who was present would know exactly who I was talking about. Pseudonyms or initials wouldn't be the telling characteristic; the entire story itself would practically shout out the name of the student or students involved. I wonder what guidelines these journaling teachers set for themselves to balance the need to honestly express their experiences and opinions and the concern for the privacy of all involved.

I think if my students were/are already into blogging, they'd be enthusiastic about a blogging assignment. If, however, it's not one of the Web 2.0 things they discovered on their own, blogging might just be another form of writing assignment--teacher-selected and directed. I can see using a blog in band as an extension of our classroom conversations about performance improvement--what we have to do when to prepare each piece of music on a concert. Blogging might allow students who hesitate to share their thoughts in front of the class a means to do so.