Elementary Edu-Bloggers

5/18/2012

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About a year ago, a teacher I follow on Facebook posted a link to a kindergarten teacher-blogger who was hosting a giveaway on her blog.  I checked out the details and found that to enter her contest you had to follow her top 40 list of bloggers.  So I did and also decided to bookmark the blogs to my browser for future reference.  Needless to say I didn't do much following because who wants to check out 40 blogs everyday?  But now thanks to my new tool, Google Reader, I have created a folder for my educational blogs and then subscribed to each of them so I can check one place to see who has posted new material.  Brilliant!  I have complied a list of my favourites for you below.
3rd Grade Gridiron



Globicate





Sunny Days In Second Grade


Teaching in the Early Years




The Lesson Plan Diva


Sharing Kindergarten



Made for 1st Grade


The Moffatt Girls


Kids Reading Activities
This is a 3rd grade teacher from the United States.  I like her blog because she shares lots of great resources and videos of things she has tried in the classroom.  She has also provided a list of her favourite online tools.

This is a neat blog with an environmental/global education perspective.  Her teaching principles include geographical knowledge and understanding, cultural awareness, working together as a global community to solve real-world issues, sharing the responsibility of caring for the Earth, and global kindness.  This blog also has some great links to facilitate connections to teachers all over the world.

This is a 2nd grade teacher blog from the United States.  She shares tons of resources and ideas from her classroom which is great because she also provides feedback for how things went when she tried them out.

I liked this blog by Shelley Gray because it is Canadian.  She blogs from a primary perspective and because she is in Manitoba, and their curriculum is very close to Saskatchewan's in some areas, her ideas can easily be adapted to meet our outcomes. I also follow Shelley on Facebook and used some of her resources during my pre-internship.

This 1st grade teacher blogger has great resources on her blog and on Teachers Pay Teachers.  She also posts a lot of freebies on her site, so it is a great one to follow.

This is a blog I hope to use a lot during my internship as I will be in a kindergarten/discovery pre-school classroom.  She has some great literacy resources and a tour of her classroom setup.

This is another 1st grade blogger.  I like the tabs at the top showcasing the literacy and math centers, as you can never have too many ideas for those!  

This blog has great resources for toddlers and pre school kids, which will also be valuable during my internship.

Lastly, this blog is a literacy resource for primary students.  It features lots of ideas and resources for teaching reading to young students.  This is one that would be valuable to primary teachers for finding different strategies to help meet different learners' needs.
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Google+Reader=Happy Blogger

5/15/2012

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My ECMP 355 class is an online course so instead of meeting in a classroom, we have a class blog that our professor uses to house our assignments and other vital information as it comes up.  The other day Dean posted a how-to video for subscribing to blogs.  When I initially saw the post I *gasp* cruised past it because I thought I already knew how.  I mean on most blogs the button is right there inviting you to subscribe, and so I deduced that the video must have been made for peeps with less technical savvy than myself.  When I clicked on that oh-so-obvious subscribe button on our class blog, the screen changed to show the same blog posts as the home page but with less pizazz.  So I decided that maybe subscribing wasn't for me and instead devised a schedule for checking my classmates' blogs manually on a rotating basis.  My plan was flawed in that there are 30 students in the class, and I found that I was checking three or four blogs before I would find one that had a new post or a post I felt compelled to comment on.  This was no good.  I needed a new plan.

So I went back to drawing board/the home page of our class blog and revisited Dean's how-to video.  And this time I watched it.  As it turns out, this guy really knows what he is talking about!  He had us subscribe to the blogs using Google Reader.  I can't even describe the awesomeness that is Google Reader; you will simply have to experience it for yourself.  You need a Google account and I had just created a fresh one to post my YouTube video below*.  So now all my blogs are neatly arranged in alphabetical order by last name (you say anal-retentive, I say organized) in an ECMP 355 folder. I scrolled through and read all the new posts of my classmates and made comments on a few that caught my eye.

Lesson learned - you win this round Mr. Shareski.  I will never again dismiss your blog posts as invaluable and instead will treasure them as potential nuggets of pure gold.

*When did Google and YouTube become an item?
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