Ferlazzo, an author and award winning educator, compiles questions and thoughts from other people to address ideas on "knowledge-gathering, classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers” (Ferlazzo). The posts are generated from readers’ write ins or questions/knowledge that Ferlazzo has gathered regarding teaching, lesson ideas, and connecting with students. He has relevant and timely posts, a recent one on engaging students to talk about race.
Education Week forces the reader to register for a free account in order to finish reading the blogs. There are also a few annoying pop ups – but the advertisements on the sides seem easy to ignore. Everything is tagged with “answers” and “instruction.” I think different and multiple tags could be used in order to better organize the information and make it more accessible for readers.
This site would be relevant to the library by allowing me to compile posts and tag them according to subject. Then when teachers need ideas about equity, racism, teaching toward background knowledge, or being better listeners, I would have some great links compiled. Specific blogs would be beneficial to highlight in a professional development, perhaps one based on reopening after Covid and being connectors for our community. I would recommend this site because Ferlazzo is so prolific and well informed. He seeks many outside resources, which can come across as too broad in some sense, but it makes the results valid and usable. I could imagine coming up with a blog site where everyone engages in an 8 week program and each week the educators are blogging about a certain topic. I think this blog could be encouraging because he seeks to connect with learners and raise questions about how to improve education.
Nielsen shares resources with teachers, educators and young people. From timely posts on anti-racism lessons and videos, to basic norms in an online classroom, she strives to connect with people and help educators. She does well and accomplishes this with prolific posts and researched collections on topics like flipped classrooms and learning assessment.
She has posts on the blog helping with teacher effectiveness, but also has posts for kids and schools on how to have people sign yearbooks. I love the “What’s Hot” section on the right sidebar of the Home page as it gives readers an idea of popular subjects and recent posts to read. I like how intimate the blog feels, as though she’s personally involved and wants to connect with other educators, but she is also professional enough for this to be intelligent and relevant.
I could use posts from this blog on teacher effectiveness as they capture specific domains of the Charlotte Danielson framework, which our county uses for teacher evaluations. I could create a professional development initiative off of these five blogs that focus on that evaluation method.
Gregory McGough seeks to gather blog posts about various opinions on education reform and make them available. He describes his partnering with the Center of Education Reform site during the times of pandemic. The edspresso branch off the main website seeks to reform education and connect people. They believe this is done by improving access to education, especially during times of virtual learning.
This collection of posts includes one that points out inequity in those who live in rural areas noting that teachers assign homework requiring internet access, but 1/3 of the students’ homes do not have internet. Some of the posts might be beneficial – like ones regarding innovation in education technology, but some are just focused on religious and private schools. I don’t see how this moves toward systemic change in education. I would have to thoroughly search through multiple contributors for those who focus on systemic reform or innovate ways to help public schooling in order to find this useful.
McGough writes about communities of practice, and how they can turn virtual, as he laments how teachers work hard and then don’t always get credit. A teacher might implement a way to measure socio-emotional learning from a post they learned from their community of practice but, if they don’t “learn” it from pre-approved sources, it doesn’t count as professional development. He references some valuable sources and ideas from this posting that I think could be used during a meeting with teachers to inspire ideas that they can bring into their classrooms.
Works Cited
Ferlazzo, Larry. “Classroom Q&A with Larry Ferlazzo.” Education Week. www.blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/. Accessed 16 June 2020.
McGough, Gregory. Edspresso, The Center for Education Reform, 31 Mar. 2020, edreform.com/edspresso/. Accessed 18 June 2020.
Nielsen, Lisa. “The Innovative Educator.” www.theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/ Accessed 17 June 2020.