Chance are slim to none that you’ve been reading this blog as long as I’ve been writing it (though I’d love to be proven wrong!). With that in mind, I thought I’d kick off October with some reruns a look back at some of my personal favorite posts from the past four-plus years I’ve been at this.
Also, welcome to any new folks who are just discovering some new blogs for the new school year. I hope you stick around and share your thoughts in the comments!
Schools: Your Friendly Neighborhood ISP? (Aug 2007)
If we are going to commit to instructing not only students, but administrators and parents, too (as folks have suggested elsewhere in the edublogosphere recently), should schools commit to providing community Internet access and education, especially in communities where folks may not even own computers?
Individual Accountability in Group Work (Jan 2008)
It’s not perfect, but it’s by far the most objective, data-driven approach to grading participation I’ve ever taken. I can’t take full credit for this, as I distinctly remember getting the basis for this from someone in the Twitterverse (sorry, can’t remember who), but I did flesh it out to suit my needs.
Open Letter to a New Teacher (Jun 2009)
It turns out that an aspiring teacher came across my resume via Google and decided to call me to ask for some advice on resources she could look to in order to prepare for her first year of teaching.
Leadership Day 2009 (Jul 2009)
Whenever I have spoken about these experiences, formally or informally, I make it a point to credit Mr. X as integral to whatever degree of success my students experienced via these projects, not because he had any hand in implementing them with me, but because he did four things that I think any supervisor would do well to emulate:
Does Gender Matter? (Aug 2009)
My wife was the first to point out the gender differences in the administrative teams, and I’m wondering if she’s on to something. This piece from Inside Higher Ed (May 2007) posits that the differences between male and female leadership styles in education are becoming less pronounced (based on a study of community college administrators), but I wonder if that can be generalized to the K-12 sector.
Text Messaging and Executive Functioning (Mar 2010)
While I’ve been utilizing SMS & email reminder systems in my personal & professional lives for years now, I’m certainly not the only one. In fact, multiple studies have shown SMS reminders to have mostly high (but admittedly varying) degrees of efficacy in increasing desired behaviors, including:
- adherence to medical treatment schedules (Jacobson & Szilagyi, 2005; Kollmann, Riedl, Kastner, Schreier, & Ludvik, 2007; Liu, Abba, Alejandria, Balanag, Berba, & Lansang, 2008; Strandbygaard, Thomsen, & Backer, 2009; Hanauer, Wentzell, Laffell, & Laffel, 2009)
- attendance at doctor & specialist appointments (Downer, Meara, Da Costa, & Sethuraman, 2006; Koshy, Car, & Majeed, 2008; Chen, Fang, Chen, Dai, 2008; Foley & O’Neill, 2009; Kruse, Hansen, & Olesen, 2009)
- participation in exercise regiments (Prestwich, Perugini, & Hurling, 2009; Prestwich, Perugini, & Hurling, 2010)
If none of these do it for you, please feel free to peruse the category of blog posts I have labeled Damian’s Favorites. I’ve found this is a good way to keep an easily-accessed portfolio of what I feel is my best stuff, and if you blog, I encourage you to do the same as well!
I’m excited that I’ve been able to ramp up my professional blogging again with some renewed interest. It’s difficult to keep a blog going for a long period of time. I’m of the opinion that each blog has it’s own life cycle, and it’s up to the blogger to determine that trajectory. I remember several of these posts.
Thanks, Rick. The best thing I ever did for my blogging was to pace myself. It used to be feast or famine with me, and I’d inevitably lose interest during the famine parts. Now, even when I go through a productive phase, I bank posts and set them to auto publish – I don’t think I’ve actually written a post since the first or second week of August, and today’s was the last one I had saved. Time to get cracking again!