I was thrilled by the opportunity to present alongside such amazing teachers, researchers, writers, and leaders this morning. To those of you who participated in our “speed-dating” roundtable fun, thank you for stopping by. I hope I was able to give you a brief taste of how I have used blogging with middle school students.

If blogging is the technology tool, the the Slice of Life Story Challenge was the “assignment” or challenge that helped my students find a purpose for the tool and allowed us to organically establish ourselves as a community of writers.

Below are the slides I shared this morning, though I didn’t get to all of them!! From slide 31 and beyond are some of the “next step” type ideas that I attempted with blogging. The idea is that blogging itself could be used as a reflective form of professional development.

As I mentioned during the roundtable, these are all things I have tried with moderate success. There are still aspects of my own blogging, student blog management, virtual assignments, and blogging as professional development that I hope to improve. Yet, that’s the value of conferences like this that provide opportunities for us to share and learn and grown and reflect on our practices as readers, writers and teachers.

Enjoy!

(For additional information, click on the gear icon to look at Speaker Notes.)

If you would like to contact me, feel free to do so at elaroom101 [at] gmail [dot] com.
~Amanda