Random collection of thoughts

Hard to believe that the second trimester has already started; one third of the year has already come and gone. Yeesh.

Tried out texthemob last week, with mixed results. Turns out quite a few of the kids have Cricket, and so weren't able to send a text to the site, so they had to go to the internet on their phones before they could register their vote. Good to know for future reference.

One of the great disadvantages of blogging is the guilt associated when one doesn't regularly update said blog. For some reason I've decided that I needed to update this blog on a weekly basis. Don't ask me why. I have no idea. At any rate, here I am again, wondering what I could possibly write about this time.

Really, though, setting aside a time to write on a regular basis is said to be a good thing, though sometimes it feels a bit like taking cod liver oil; not that I ever did, but from what I'm told, I'm lucky to have escaped that little fate.

So here we are towards the end of November with one marking period behind me and what have I learned? Well, getting students to embrace technology is a bit more difficult than I'd originally anticipated, for one. I figured I'd offer them the chance to blog and such and off they'd run. Not so. I had more students than I thought I would completely bypass blogging for the entire term, for a variety of reasons, and though I was given a wide range of whys and wherefores, I think part of it simply came down to a lack of confidence in their own writing ability combined with a self-consciousness that the world would see them and even see through them; a fear shared not only by many students, but many adults as well.

That's a lot of what writing is, really. The laying bare of the soul. Even the most mundane entry says something about the writer, and it is for this reason most people seem to fear putting their thoughts down anywhere, let alone on a public forum like a blog.

So how will I combat this with my students? I'm not sure, really. A few of my students read my blog, and so they get to see my writing, warts and all, but there must be another way to encourage them to step beyond their boundaries, their comfort zones, and step into the world of writing. I'm not sure what those strategies are yet, but I'm open to suggestions.