Three Teaching Blogs I Like

While I am VERY NEW to K-12 teaching and learning, I've discovered a few blogs that are getting me up to speed on the transition from college-level teaching to middle and high school language arts. Here are three blogs I like in no particular order.

1. Language Arts Classroom
     Lauralee Moss founded this blog as a means to provide practical tools for ELA teachers. What I've enjoyed is the blog site's organization by category: ELA, Classroom, and Education. The "ELA" category posts a range of resources from classroom tech, to various literary skills, to standardized testing. Each post is usually titled "How to..." or "Ways to use..." and, just like it promises, the content walks users through the steps to implement these tools in the classroom. The "Classroom" section is full of ways to design your classroom space, management & procedure options, and building a community in the classroom. Finally, "Education" has posts about the profession, from reviews of the latest books to handling angry parents. Overall, this blog is helping me build a toolkit of practical teaching resources to use when I begin to teach.

2. Class Tech Tips
     Monica Burns is my new shero. While she's a tech geek extraordinaire, her mission is to foster a learning environment that prioritizes "tasks before apps" (also the title of her book). The goal is to use technology as a tool to enhance and deepen learning. While this blog covers the spectrum of K-12, the tech is easily adaptable to a teacher's learning goals and subject area.

3. Mindful Schools
     This site is maintained by a collective of educators committed to "education, social justice, and mindfulness." While this is another generalist site that spans K-12, I find the resources are highly applicable to my age group of adolescents. After all, research shows that when adolescents receive training in personal skills such as self-awareness, mood regulation, stress-reduction, and empathy that these skill-sets translate into deeper learning. I'm invested in teaching the whole student, and with almost 50% of our public school kids scoring at least a 1 on the ACE test of childhood trauma, it's important to remember that what our students experience outside of school impacts their ability to learn in the classroom.