Yay for me finally getting my blog for this class started! EDU 590 is my first graduate class, and it has been very hard for me to find time to work on the assignments as I'm usually at school doing school work until 7 or 8, then I go home and do more school work until I go to bed. Why do I feel like a first year teacher when it's my third year?  I do not want to sound like a complainer because I LOVE my job when I'm with the kids, and you, my classmates out there, definitely know how it is! I just wanted to explain myself a little since I seem like such a slacker by starting my blogs with less than a week of class left!

Anyway... this weekend I realized I needed to start getting things done for this class! Getting this blog set up was easy for me, because I already had a blogger account. I already have blogs through blogger for the classes I teach, so I just had to go to my dashboard and create a new blog.  If anyone is interested in seeing my class blogs, they are

oplandalgebra1a.blogspot.com and oplandmath1.blogspot.com.

The primary reason I have these blogs is to post daily homework assignments. Students rarely communicate with me via commenting on my blog, but I tell them that they may if they wish to. If I ever want to create an assignment for them which requires them posting something on my blog, at least I have the means to do so now.

If you check out either of my class blogs, you will notice several headings that look like they should be links, but the links don't work. My intention was to have the links connect to files that would be uploaded on my district webspace.  I have done this in the past, and it worked out nicely, since blogger doesn't have a way to put up actual files (like pdf or word documents, for example), as far as I know. But this past summer our district was remodeling the district website and they did not provide a way for teachers to create webpages until a few weeks into the school year.  I had hoped to set up my district website before the school year actually started, but since there was no way of doing that, I was unable to put links on my class blogs to files which I had previously stored on my district web space (like my syllabus, calendar, etc). I still have yet to learn about how to create my own website on our newly revamped district site, but hopefully I can do that soon. Then I will actually be able to fix the links on my class blogs.

For our survey for class, I ended up just making my own using mostly questions we created as a class, but I added some district-specific ones and a few others that I thought of last-minute, as well. I was curious to see how many people in my district actually figured out how to create a homepage on our new district website (because we were only provided with instructions for how to set one up online). Out of the 38 teachers who have responded to my survey so far, only 21% of them said they had a teacher homepage though our district's website. Evidently there are others who have created some type of site on their own, like me, because 37% of the teachers claimed to have some sort of class website, even if not from their district webspace.