Teach42

The Bionic Teacher has an interesting post up entitled What I’ve Learned So Far. I recommend you go visit there and read through the post, but there’s a few quotes in there I want to mention.

“Comments mean a lot… Comments mean you have been heard. What you said mattered enough to someone to take the time to write something back… This is also something to keep in mind when I am grading papers.”

Interesting idea, bringing weblog comments back to the classroom and grading. Are they really so different? The comments you write on a paper are often the only feedback that a student gets. It serves as a conversation between you and a student and can be incredibly valuable or tremendously harmful. Are people who comment on blog posts ‘grading’ your writing? In some sense they are. They’re providing their own ideas and feedback about what you’ve written. Is that really so different than what teachers do to student’s papers? Not really.

“There is something powerful in finding a group of people who share your interests… I get excited about this stuff and I have found some other people who share that. I would/will gladly go to a lot of trouble to help you out because I feel a certain kinship there. I also know there are plenty of you out there who would do the same for me. This community is there to help, to inspire and to challenge each other. That creates better teachers and better ideas.”

Learning communities. People who have never met each other who would bend over backward to help out in any way they can. I know the feeling. I get emails all the time from people listening to the podcast who want a little bit of help to get started. Does it bother me? Not in the least. Quite the opposite, I look forward to it. There’s something tremendously satisfying about helping someone else do something that you know will wind up improving the education that a class of students receives. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside

Blogging represents the way things are changing, but there’s so much more going on. On-line communities are simply changing the way we work, the way we think, the way we live. It’s a very exciting time to be alive. People are connecting in ways that we never could have even imagined 100 years ago.

For some reason, I feel like singing, “It’s a small world after all…”

Stop by and visit Bionic Teacher. He’s got some interesting stuff going on over there.

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