Seriously. Someone stole a weenie.

Yes, sadly, I do sometimes use this blog for professional notes rather than self-indulgent posts about how much I love my wife. You may ignore.

Notes on Blogging for New Teacher Support
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about communities of affinity, bulletin boards and blogrings that grow up around a particular topic or interest, that are self-regulating and self-sustaining. People are willing to share quite a bit for free. (see Wikipedia, Teacher Wiki)

The model should be extensible to new teacher support and mentoring, provided that modelling, leadership, and incentive exist.

Modelling: Hipteacher, Teacher of the Year
Leadership: Mentor teachers should be expected (and incentive should exist) to blog regularly on reflections on life in the classroom and at the school as a whole. Perhaps a series of topics could be given in advance of the school year and mentors would be expected to touch upon each topic at some point in the year. Commenting should be encouraged at the end of each entry (example).
Incentive: New teachers need to see that the practice can save them time or energy, OR need to see how blogging can connect them to part of a greater blogging community. External incentive must exist (CEU credit for new teachers, mentor pay for existing teachers). Time savers: Will communities of affinity form in comments areas, and will those communities contribute meaningfully to the teaching process for new teachers? Can those contributions save them time? Will teachers use blogs as a dump for research, a la White Noise? Connections to community: CEU credit should be tied to commenting in blogs related by afiinity, as well as posting levels throughout the year. Mentors should regularly be reading new teacher blogs.

RSS reader with pre-set OPML file would be required during launch to make this process easier. Is this an effective way to integrate professional development into the school day, rather than leaving it for out-of-school situations? Could this be marketed as CEU credit people can get during a planning period?

Barriers: How do you measure participation? Raw numbers of posts will not be acceptable, as grunters could emerge.

Payback is hell:

http://www.rosswhite.com/ben/archives/cheated.html

Found in B-Mo’s blog.