My inspiration

After doing research for a paper on grassroots journalism for a graduate course, I ran across the idea of transparency and started to think of the possibilities for education. Luckily for me, my school has an administrator who has seen the possibilities of blogging and I e-mailed Will about it. He posted my e-mail here. http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2005/03/01#a3199 This was really an exciting couple of days as my mind kept racing through the possibilities (although I didn't really do justice to that research paper).

I wanted to introduce my students and their parents to the theories and guidelines that teachers use to plan a lesson, unit, and course. But much more importantly I wanted to open up the process to them and other teachers and administrators as well. To me collaboration and discussion gives all of us more ideas and knowledge to draw from. I also hoped it would involve the students better, if they could have a voice in their learning. This evolved into creating a weblog (along with my social studies teaching partner and student teacher) for my American Studies class. This class is a sophomore level class that combines the 10th grade English curriculum with study of US History from 1920 to the present.

Of course, nothing goes as well as planned, and one of the things I'd like to use this blog for is as a chronicle of this process.