A High School Teacher Blog Grows From Grass Roots

By Bertha Sanders


In the light of technological developments it is fairly inevitable that the high school teacher blog will become a prominent feature of the educational scene. Teachers are paid to do something like blogging. They are paid to tell others about the way things are and in that way blogging and teaching are similar.

Teaching is a social profession that involves being shut in a room with twenty or thirty students for most of a working day. Paradoxically this can be quite lonely because a distance must be maintained between the teacher and the students. Too much familiarity can cause many personal problems and the distance is an essential aspect of leadership. A web log can help individual teachers connect with colleagues and share issues with them as peers.

The world may be en route to being a global community but it is far from its destination. Many people still have no computer and have not joined the Internet community. Others do have computer access but have yet to grasp that America is not the whole world. The assumptions that they reveal in their writing expose the extent to which they are bound to parochialism in the age of globalization.

It seems that the online world evolves so rapidly that there is hardly time for academics to lay out parameters, as they do in courses like English 101. Instead people learn in an evolutionary manner, quickly learning by osmosis, as in the famous case of the slum children let loose in a barn full of computers which they had working in no time. Browsing through the fields of web logs one finds a refreshing diversity. In many cases writers seem to write for specific audiences, apparently not realizing that their words are published world wide.

In many cases it would appear there is no intention to write for a global audience. Teachers within a school use blogs almost as personal journals or as supplementary teaching tools. Messages about homework or domestic issues are published. A teacher no longer has to walk along a corridor handing out written notes because this can be done through blogs. However, many people think that such domestic issues should be dealt with through an Intranet, or cloud rather than the Internet which is world wide.

Irrespective of whether web logs are used for specific or general purposes their popularity seems to point unequivocally to the fact that technological change has at last caught up with education. Teachers and students appear to be ahead of planners and school administrators because they are the ones who are actually teaching and learning.

Though some politicians still try to take credit for building more classrooms in the egg box style of the nineteenth century children now learn through electronic devices. They do not need to be squashed into unruly crowds in box like classrooms where they essentially waste their time.

In the light of evolving technology the educational apparatus that has been in place since the nineteenth century has become obsolescent. Though some schools still ban cell phones in classrooms the fact that hand held devices can give access to world experts and to the great libraries of the world has already altered the face of education. The popularity of the high school teacher blog is an indication that there are people address the consequences of the revolution.




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