Blog Reviews

Where do I start when reviewing others' blogs? I suppose it can be summed up in one word: WOW! I am amazed at all of the things that other people in the course were able to accomplish. I was also secretly pleased throughout the course to read about challenges that classmates had with posting pictures, getting headers to stretch (I still never figured that one out), and so on because I had so many frustrations myself.

There were so many good blogs that I looked at and had to quickly look away from because they were so amazing and complex that I found myself feeling so unworthy, and well, simply jealous (whew, I finally said it for all the world to see)! There were a few in particular that I kept looking back to for various reasons, and they are listed in more detail below.

First, was Geo Intergrations because of the positive, uplifting attitude towards science and the lack of available educational opportunities for elementary teachers in the science area. I was amazed that she is a K-5 science coach, and was not aware that positions like that even existed! Sure, my district has a science department and one elementary and one secondary support teacher for the ENTIRE district, and we are the largest district in the state... So to see some of the resources Jennifer has posted on her site (which by the way I have borrowed the idea and made my own listing of links, thanks Jennifer!) as well as her excited, engaging attitude towards improving the opportunities for elementary teachers of science - it was appealing.

Secondly, Dan's Alaska Connections because of the uncluttered layout and organization of pictures and overall easy-to-read-ness. His writing is succinct and gets to the point, with some strong analysis and reflection. I especially liked his blog reviews (both the positives and the negatives), but I especially agreed with this statement he made: "A few things that I personally was not fond of included harsh color schemes, especially when used with text, small fonts, poor grammar, multiple typos, and photos of large, dead, big game animals (not that they weren't cool photos, they just seem out of context to the subject at hand)." Need I say more?

Thirdly, even though Tundra Teacher got a late start like me, I loved reading about the stories of the people in her community as well as her Yupik Immersion school. I only wish that I had stories and experiences to tell of from my everyday life like she did. Thank you for sharing ;)

Woven Ideas and Practices was one of my favorite ones to read because of her direct and honest writing. I often read hers over telling myself that if I could just figure out how to "talk" to the reader like she did much of my blogging would flow more naturally. One of the other things that resonated with me while reading hers was her attitude about making positive changes in her life: "I am proud to say that I am going to make some positive changes in my life to be part of the growing movement to know more about the products that I use and purchase. I understand that the changes that I make in my household will encourage my children to have the same patterns that I do about recycling. This is an important lesson that we can not only admire but try to emulate from our indigenous cultures." Way to drive the point home! She also was amazed at all that she had learned, and I would have to say that I share that sentiment. Lastly, I noticed that many of the photo credits on her
website were for bing.com, so I went ahead and checked it out and found a large amount of high quality images - only wish I had found out about this sooner! (Green Earth Photo Credit: you guessed it, bing.com!)

Lastly, the Life in Alaska had some very nice high quality pictures, that end up being quite powerful in helping to drive whatever points he was making home, such as: the arctic haze caused by factory pollution, very popular political president slam (one of my personal favorites out of every blog!), arctic sea ice and the cute jumping polar bear, volcano crater with fumarole activity, and last all the way back to the cute magazine cover of St. George Island. Inspirational.