Blogging about Critical Issues in Education

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Unless you are already in the practice of checking news and media sources on a regular basis, it can be challenging to stay current on the issues being discussed in relation to our field. This blog has been created to support exploration of educational issues from a variety of sources. We will talk about some of the different media venues we might want to use and I have also included some links to the right.

Our goal is to cultivate a habit of practice of regularly monitoring or reading and writing/posting reviews [or annotated bibliographies as appropriate] on important educational topics. Aim for at least one posting a week, and try looking at a variety of sources outside of the ones you typically frequent. Sources can include newspapers, research journals, books, book chapters, magazines, and radio segments or podcast, television shows, and credible internet media. In other words...the gamut!

Tips:
→ Practice your blogging skills and embedded visuals or multimedia.
→ Please ensure links are live.
→ Don't forget to add a label so that we can access posts by themes. A number have already been created in previous posts created by my students in other courses, so use those or create new ones as needed.

Posts can be either a short form annotated bibliography, or a summary that includes the following:

• Title
• Source/Author/Date
• URL Link
• Key Points
• Relevance
• Intended Audience

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Making Sense of the Cloud

The tag cloud has become somewhat of a mess. I took it upon myself to try to make a little more sense of it by picking out the most used tags (subject tags with three or more) that were not names of people or publishers.

I thought that I would share my information with you all. I have not gone over the whole list to see if any terms or phrases could be consolidated to clean it up at all; that is something we all may want to consider.

Anyway, here is what I found in terms of hot topic subjects:

Making Sense of the Cloud:

1) The Politics of Education (8)

2) Education Budget (6)

3) Teacher Evaluation (5)

4) Teacher Responsibilities (4)

5) Advanced Placement (3)

5) Diversity (3)

5) English Language Learning (3)

5) No Child Left Behind (3)

5) Value-Added Analysis (3)

5) What are Schools for? (3)

5) What is a Good Teacher? (3)

Not a whole lot of surprises here. We live in a politically charged time, the budget is tight, and the role of the teacher is evolving--causing questions about how they should be evaluated and what their responsibilities are. A big, catch-all tied for fifth, including: the role of testing, teacher evaluation (again), diversity and English language issues, and AP classes.

A little analysis was needed so that I could make sense of the growing blue blob at the top of the blog and I thought I would share it.