Thing Three

Blogs! Educational blogs! They are growing in number, quality and variety in a staggering fashion. It would be easy to get lost in them, but with some restraint, they can be extremely valuable. Need to find out how to integrate an iPad into a classroom setting - it's out there. Need to figure out a way to meet the needs of students with multiple disabilities - it's out there. Need to understand the reasons to allow students to text within a school - it must be out there, too.
Blogs are the newest form for research we have available to us today. Twenty years ago if you wanted to find information related to teaching you asked friends, went to conferences, or visited a library and delved into books and journals. Ten years ago, you could try your luck with the internet and use resources at regional learning centers and national education organizations. Today, the blogsphere is the best and fastest source for immediate, hopefully accurate answers. It is just a matter of being aware of a wide variety of blogs and going to the right blog for the needed information.
It will be so much easier for our students to gather information for classes if they are provided with the links on our blogs. Then, with the motivation to make good use of them, they can fill in the missing pieces needed to succeed. If they share information with others and get a good dialogue going, all the better. Blogs are the next step in the evolution of research - let's try to make the best use possible of them.