Happy 2nd Birthday, Blog!

Hard to believe, but it's my blog's second birthday. Well, actually, its birthday passed more than a week ago and I forgot about it, so I thought I'd celebrate now.

I've been looking through posts from the last year to see what I wrote about at various points in the school year and have found several that stuck with me all year. Last summer I wrote about revising my syllabi to reflect changes in technology use. I did that, but later realized that I missed the most important part of the revision. I need to actually TEACH students about responsible media use. I suppose I do teach it to an extent, but not formally enough.

Of course, all of this is related to issues with filtering sites at school, which I wrote about here and here. At this point, I am firmly in the camp that espouses the idea that school filters need to go away and educators need to work with students to responsibly use the internet. I recently read an article (unfortunately, I can't remember where it was) that points out that within a few years our students will all have smartphones anyway, so filters will be pointless. Last year I had one class where 50% of the students had smartphones.

Last year, I also wrote about my thoughts on school reform. I didn't see much by way of courageous conversations in my area this year, but that's another story. Like many other teachers, I found 2009-10 to be a difficult year in education and thus had several periods of little activity on this blog. That's another story too.

So, where do I go from here? As my educational interests evolve, I find that I more frequently want to write about things other than technology integration in the classroom. I'm not sure yet if that will fit here or if I need to start another blog. I know that I will continue to blog about my experiences with tech integration.

As time has passed, more people have visited this blog each month. I appreciate that and hope that you are finding things that are useful in these posts.

Here's to another year of working to improve education and sharing my efforts with others!


photo from: Theresa Thompson, Creative Commons Set, Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/22998854@N02/2311733808/