At our first official WA STEM meeting eight middle and high school math and science teachers met in a lodge away from all our worries to become bloggers. Each teacher equipped with an iPad shared different apps as well as tips and tricks to using the iPad. Some of us have purchased cases or coverings for our iPads reflecting our different styles. Just as easily as young kids take to the touch screen technology and portability of these machines eight teachers were seated comfortably in a circle navigating the different screens and apps
Teachers were offered different websites to start their personal blogs. We looked at WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr. I had heard from other teachers that Tumblr was easy to start and use so I introduced it that way. It truly was easy to create a new account and to start the first blog. Some of us were using WordPress so we stuck with it. It wasn’t long before teachers found a critical flaw with Tumblr that had completely escaped me – there was no way to leave comments! No way to leave comments? Are you kidding me? Blogging is a great way to reflect and record your thoughts, buy what brings blogging to the next level is being able to get feedback, answers, and thoughts from other people, anywhere in the world at anytime. Alas, Tumblr would not do.
Those of us who had WordPress were fine but there were a bunch of our team who had written their first blog on Tumblr and they wanted to transfer that blog to a place that offered commenting. One teacher tried to start an account with Blogspot (which seems to be another name for Blogger) and found that it was also very easy. So we have some teachers blogging on WordPress and others on Blogspot.
Here are our blogs:
http://quilbilly.blogspot.com/
http://marenjohnson.wordpress.com
http://mathschmitt.blogspot.com/
http://scienceracquet.blogspot.com/
http://sunmath2.blogspot.com/
http://debbieberreth.wordpress.com/
http://educatoral.com/wordpress/
