I did it. I finally decided to start a blog. And here I am, blogging about starting a blog. Let's see where this takes me!
During my masters year at UConn in the Neag School of Education, I was given the opportunity to go to the ATOMIC conference in December of 2015. I LOVE teacher conferences. I love learning, I love collaborating, and I love making connections with other teachers... so clearly, going to the conference was a no-brainer. It was at this conference, that I was inspired to join the twitter community.
I love learning, I love collaborating, and I love making connections with other teachers.
Getting Involved in Twitter
The keynote speaker at the ATOMIC conference was Rafranz Davis, and to be honest I have no clue what the main point of her speech was, but it impacted me and my teaching in ways I had never imagined. She told us about #MTBoS or the "Math Twitter Blog-o-sphere" and about this whole community online that was sharing ideas about teaching math... Every. Single. Day. HOW COOL?! That night, I went home and made myself a math twitter handle with a nerdy math teacher name. I was so excited to release my nerdy self to the public as @MathyMissGrove. At this point, I was interning at a school and just beginning to find myself as a teacher. I had NO IDEA what to tweet about, so I would scroll and follow whomever appeared to have cool ideas about teaching math.
It wasn't until halfway through my first year of teaching that I decided I had done something really worthy of tweeting. I was introducing systems of equations and I used sticky notes to get my point across. It went so well, even the students were impressed. So, I decided to tweet it out. It was time I share something with the world of math teachers. I took a picture of my board, and I sent out the tweet.
That night, I was overwhelmed by the way my tweet was received. People were responding, liking, and retweeting MY tweet. People who I looked up to in a way were impressed by MY idea! I was so excited. I finally felt like I had something to contribute to the people who had basically carried me through teaching up until this point. I went in to school the next day with pride, told my students that I was "twitter famous" and they laughed when I said I had a whole 99 followers.
I had finally made my way into the MTBoS community.
The result of my ONE big tweet? I started tweeting more. I started connecting with other teachers more. I started to respond to other teachers when they tweeted. I had finally made my way into the MTBoS community and I realized how valuable that community could be to me.
So why start a blog?
After really getting involved in the twitter community, I have shared so many ideas, but not many resources, unless people specifically tweet back asking me to share. I want to be as helpful as all of the teachers that I steal resources from... all of the time. I decided to start a blog to keep the ball rolling.
I have found the teaching world to be such a selfless world. If you do something that you think is great, why not share and help other people do something great? Each of us has different skills in teaching, and the more we share, the more we are able to gain knowledge and be better teachers ourselves.
As I said before, I love learning, I love collaborating, and I love making connections with other teachers. The goal of starting this blog is to continue to do just that.
I can't promise I'll be good at it. I can't promise that I'll post all the time. But I am starting something new, and here goes nothing!