George Couros and blogging..

As part of my own professional learning I decided to start a blog this year.  I decided to use Blogger and had my students set up their own blogs right away in early September.  The goal for me, was to have a place for my students to reflect on their learning, and to create online portfolios.  My professional blog has been shared with parents, as a way to keep them in the loop.  I also use it to model what I'd like the students to be doing.
I discovered right away that I don't love it.  Perhaps it's just that Blogger is not the right fit for my vision: student portfolios.  Students cannot create separate pages in order to organize their work and ideas.  I was disappointed with this.  Also - with the fast paced learning environment and so much going on, it is hard to keep the students momentum and interest with the blogs.  Perhaps I need to make more of an effort to embed it in our day, or find other ways to keep the students interested.
All that said, I did find that George Couros made some great points.  I completely agree that we often want to jump on all the technology bandwagons.  Try this, try that, and most of it flops and we haven't spent the time to really perfect one thing.  That is why I wanted to focus on blogging this year and let my class Twitter account sit dormant for now, as well as the Edmodo community that I tried last year.  Often there is so much thrown at us that we don't even know where to begin.  We also feel guilty that we are not doing it all.  We don't need to!  We need to focus in on one thing, and be great at it, then move on and grow from there.
I also agree that self-reflection and keeping a journal are great ways to focus our thoughts and that it is "part of our work" to reflect.  For some of us that can be as simple as sitting for a few moments to think things through, for others it may be blogging.  This is coming from a man who has quite a bit on his plate - and a big position.  Perhaps for the classroom teacher, like me, blogging may seem like too much.  Who is reading it?  Do people want to read my thoughts?  Are parents actually taking the time to visit?  Now that I've started my own, I'm not so sure.  I guess only time will tell.
Feel free to visit my school blog.