All About Me- EDU 671

My name is Lisa Carbone. I'm 28 years old and have been teaching second grade in San Diego at the Poway Unified School District for the last three years. I love my job very much, and am excited to further my education by completing my MATLT through Ashford University. My goal is to continue to grow into a stronger educator with each school year, and to continually improve my curriculum to keep my students engaged and excited about learning.

Even just from my first year of teaching to my third year, I have noticed a push for greater integration of technology into the classroom. I enjoy technology and definitely see a place for it in the classroom, but I would say I am fairly technologically literate, so I am excited to continue learning from the various courses that make up my MATLT.

I began this blog 4 years ago for a course while I was getting my teaching credential, and never really continued on with it. I actually forgot about it until I was required to blog for my last course. It was great to read posts that I published several years ago, and I'm excited to continue working on it now. The only thing I am struggling with is changing the title of my blog, since I created it four years ago. I will work on changing the title.

Blogging as a Learning Tool

I realized by visiting www.blogger.com that I had an existing blog from about five years ago. As part of one of my prerequisites for my teaching credential program, I took a course where we were required to set up and blog to share with our classmates. It was neat to see and review the posts I had created several years ago. Some of the topics I blogged about were interactive classrooms and ELL students. I definitely believe that a blog can be a great platform for creating a hands-on learning activity. I believe that a blog can be an effective learning tool in creating space for students to "convene" and share ideas outside of the four walls of their classroom. At my school several of the upper-grade classes have a classroom blog. Through the classroom blog teachers and students can post in a place where they feel safe and comfortable to share information and their views on a specific area of the curriculum they may be focusing on at the time. Students and teachers are able to comment on the posts, helping to further student learning beyond the classroom.

A con of blogging could be that they can require maintenance and a lot of up keep in order to keep them organized, up to date, and active. Without putting in time and blogging and posting on a regular basis, then the blog will not be as effective as it could be. Also, technology is ever changing, so just when you feel comfortable with blogging or a certain format that you may be using, you may have to be ready to adapt and make changes.

Pros of blogging include that you have a platform to instantly share information and views with others. Also, a pro of blogging is being able to reach a specific group of people. Like I mentioned, some teachers have set up blog specifically for their classrooms. Reaching a specific group of people is a pro because as the teacher or student posting, you are aware of exactly who your audience is. It also allows people to feel safe and comfortable, which makes them more likely to take risks with their learning.