Reflecting on Teacher Blogs
Lately I’ve been looking at a variety of teachers’ blogs. It’s useful to see what others are doing. The blogs I encountered range from the most personal/informal to the clearly professional.
One of the professional blogs I found is owned by a retired college English teacher; the years of experience must help with the generation of ideas. In “Ask the English Teacher”, the writer focuses on the language much more than on himself. The titles of his posts clearly indicate this: “A Lost American Accent”, “How to Pronounce ‘the’”, “Original English”, “Capitalizing Proper Nouns …or Not?” etc.
Another interesting blog belongs to a school teacher who writes about technology in the English classroom. You will notice, however, that the writer of “Enhanced English Teacher” indicates that she is not posting much because she is busy, and seems to have turned to Twitter instead since 2010. Clearly tweeting is much easier for busy teachers than full-fledged blogging. Some less formal, more personal blogs include the following: “Hipteacher”, by a writer, teacher, and educational consultant; “ESL Blogs from English Teachers in Asia”; and “Ranting Teacher” by yet another busy educator who has recently turned to Twitter. The lines between the professional and the personal can be blurry as in “Jimbo’s English Teaching in Japan” - and at the extreme of informality (and possibly lack of professionalism) are blogs that can have negative repercussions on the writers’ careers, as indicated in this article about a suspended teacher: “Blogging High School Teacher Has No Job - and No Regrets”.
While blogging is still thriving, one conclusion seems to be that it is giving way to tweeting in some cases, but tweeting is micro-blogging, so any talk of the death of blogging is premature and possibly flawed. For now, I shall stick to blogging as it is more expressive in my view. Still, writing a blog is not an easy business. It requires time, tact, and perseverance, and it is more likely to be successful if it is reader-centered.
Posted by May Mikati on 05 October 2011, 9:54 PM
Lately I’ve been looking at a variety of teachers’ blogs. It’s useful to see what others are doing. The blogs I encountered range from the most personal/informal to the clearly professional.
One of the professional blogs I found is owned by a retired college English teacher; the years of experience must help with the generation of ideas. In “Ask the English Teacher”, the writer focuses on the language much more than on himself. The titles of his posts clearly indicate this: “A Lost American Accent”, “How to Pronounce ‘the’”, “Original English”, “Capitalizing Proper Nouns …or Not?” etc.
Another interesting blog belongs to a school teacher who writes about technology in the English classroom. You will notice, however, that the writer of “Enhanced English Teacher” indicates that she is not posting much because she is busy, and seems to have turned to Twitter instead since 2010. Clearly tweeting is much easier for busy teachers than full-fledged blogging. Some less formal, more personal blogs include the following: “Hipteacher”, by a writer, teacher, and educational consultant; “ESL Blogs from English Teachers in Asia”; and “Ranting Teacher” by yet another busy educator who has recently turned to Twitter. The lines between the professional and the personal can be blurry as in “Jimbo’s English Teaching in Japan” - and at the extreme of informality (and possibly lack of professionalism) are blogs that can have negative repercussions on the writers’ careers, as indicated in this article about a suspended teacher: “Blogging High School Teacher Has No Job - and No Regrets”.
While blogging is still thriving, one conclusion seems to be that it is giving way to tweeting in some cases, but tweeting is micro-blogging, so any talk of the death of blogging is premature and possibly flawed. For now, I shall stick to blogging as it is more expressive in my view. Still, writing a blog is not an easy business. It requires time, tact, and perseverance, and it is more likely to be successful if it is reader-centered.
Posted by May Mikati on 05 October 2011, 9:54 PM
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