C4T #3 Summary

In the teacher blog What "Ed said" she posted 10 Tips for (reticent) bloggers… In this post she explains how many people try to say they just can not do a blog, or they have writers block so she posted 10 Tips:

1. Write in your own voice, as if you are talking to people you know.
2. Don’t over-think and over-plan, just write what’s in your head. You can write another post when you have developed your thinking further.
3. Don’t agonise over whether it’s good enough. Write, check, post, done. You’ll improve with practice.
4. Never force it. If an idea for a post isn’t working, scrap it.
5. Avoid long slabs of text. Write in paragraphs. Use headings, images and bullet points to express your thinking clearly and ensure your message is evident.
6. Don’t explain everything. Use hyper-links to existing explanations on your blog and elsewhere on the internet.
7. Shorter posts are better than long ones. Always. Big idea? Break it into two posts. Small idea? Sometimes one paragraph is enough.
8. You don’t need to have all the answers. Some of my most successful posts have been composed entirely of questions.
9. Exclude all words that just don’t add anything. This was the very best piece of advice I read when I first started blogging. Carefully re-read posts that you have written and try to remove all the extraneous words that add little or nothing.
10. Exercise humility. (The tips above work for me, I’m just sharing…)
My comment to her was: I had never used a blog before this semester, and it has been a journey. I have learned a lot about HTML code and things I never realized were important. I believe these 10 tips would benefit our class, as many of us have never done a blog before this class.

The next post I read was Snippets from the SOME… SOME is a program where this teacher talks to students and teaches them from across the country. She explained how she played a game with them to learn their names. Each student said their name and a sport they like. Each student after that had to repeat the other students' names and sport then add their own. Another class period she talked to them about daylight savings time. She herself got to school an hour early because she did not change her clock. So, she tried to show them where they were on Google maps, but they were real quick to tell her she was incorrect. So, she showed them how to pull it up on the computer and "share" the screen with her. The next class time they had together she was very disappointed. The students were not having fun as usual, they were sitting in straight rows, and kept looking to the back of the room. Come to find out there was a teacher in the back of the room.

My comment: I makes me wonder how different their teaching methods are. If they were so scared to act as they normally do just because one of their teachers was in the classroom with them.