A little reflection -- blogosphere!

Once a person spends time following blogs and combing through material upon material, it isn't surprising that hours have passed.  I found myself glued to the several types of blogs that I was following as there is so much content to look at from the blogs I spoke about in my last post.

In order to give you a brief look at what these blogs are about, I will share my reviews, below.

(A quick side note, I noticed I follow all male bloggers, which was entirely by coincidence and may incidentally carry a biased viewpoint of the education scene... I am open to suggestions for female bloggers to follow!)


Dr. Z Reflects: http://drzreflects.blogspot.com/

- I find this blog to be an extremely useful tool in learning more about emerging technologies from an instructor's viewpoint.  I view this blog as a supplemental item in the vast array of resources provided in his course, but I also see the blog as a way to create a dialogue that can be initiated through the use of questions at the end of each blog.  I plan to check back often as I think Dr. Z has a lot of important information to share!  (Edit: 6/19/12 -- I also like the RAGBRAI posts infused in this blog -- I wish I could ride the whole week this year, but alas, will have to check into @zeitz for Twitter updates.)

David Warlick - 2 cents worth: http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/

- I was introduced to Mr. Warlick at the TICL 2011 conference in Storm Lake, Iowa last summer.  His keynote address was excellent and provided a chance to meet someone who really set the bar high for technology integration.  I will ll admit, I was extremely overwhelmed by the amount of information he provided during his time at TICL, and felt a little technologically-challenged as I barely knew what a tweet was coming into the conference.  Since the conference, I have checked back into his blog quite frequently and I receive new updates via Twitter when he has new blog posts.  A big thing I enjoyed learning about (and count to enjoy learning about) is Mr. Warlick's ideas from his book "A Gardener's Approach to Learning."  I have not purchased the book, maybe I'll request it for my upcoming birthday, but I review the notes I took during his breakout sessions from the conference.  This blog is a good one and will continue to be a source of information for me and hopefully my followers.

Joe Bower - for the love of learning: http://www.joebower.org/

- Joe Bower came onto my radar after many discussions of education reform in my mentoring meetings during this past school year.  First, I had no idea who Joe Bower was and probably never would have known about him if I had not looked up Rick Wormeli on YouTube and began watching his videos and following him on Twitter.  Through Twitter is where I met Joe Bower.  Mr. Bower's blog is not for the cut and dry, play it by the book, sit in your chair and let me share my knowledge, educators.  He's a reformer with a unique approach to our education system.  I have enjoyed quite a bit of Joe's work, but particularly enjoyed this blog -- "Here's What Really Happens When You Give A Zero."  His approach may not be mainstream, and may be hard to accept; but it does a great job of keeping the education reform discussion going.  It is clear that our education system needs fixing.


I have enjoyed my time looking at blogs and will continue to do so beyond this class.  I hope you took interest in the brief review of the three blogs I followed this past week.  If you have any suggestions as to which blogs I should follow please drop me a comment in the space below.  Now onto organizing all of my followed blogs onto ONE blogger account...