Miss W. and her Smartboard

Everyday, I come into my blog and check if anyone has written a comment.  None for a couple of days but I notice my clustrmap has a few more dots on it.  So how am I going to get people to read my thoughts and questions and also post a comment?

I know, look at a few other blogs from well known bloggers, see what they are writing about, add a comment to something they have written. 

 Well I started with Sue Waters at Edublogger which I also read daily for her hints on how to improve your blog.  In the comments, I then check out the blogs of those people and today found quite a few.  I began with Cathy Nelson posting about her 2008 goals, keeping your head in the sand and women bloggers.  From there I checked out a few of the other comments and this lead to Kathy Schrock with her list of tech educators and Leslie Fisher with her travels in Australia.  I can see from this I am going to have to add to my blogroll.

Well I can see tomorrow will be another day of reading, writing lessons for my smartboard and updating my blogroll.

I do quite a bit of research based learning in my classroom as I feel too often students are spoonfed lots of knowledge but not taught the skills to think for themselves. They wait for either the teacher or a parent to give them the book or page number to find the information. So I was very interested in the article by Graham Wegner who tells the reader about research based learning in his school. Personally, I love teaching the research process first to the whole class, so they realise they have to set questions, find both primary and secondary resources, justify their decisions about the big question then finally present to their peers. Students then keep a journal (maybe they will be answering my blog posts this year), organize interview times with me and plan their long term goals with regard to the topic they have chosen. Setting their goals is often a problem but practice does make it easier.