Welcome to this blog!

During Tech Week in August, I decided to initiate a blog that would allow us to communicate with each other about our basic skills work in math.

If you're not entirely familiar with blogging (and believe me, I'm a novice!), it may seem a bit daunting. But when I remember the procedures, it's fairly simple.

The bigger question might be, why blog? Blogging will allow any of us to post an entry. Entries could be commentary or questions about our instructional practice, the curriculum, success stories, useful handouts, articles, even Math for All Kinds of Minds! Once an entry is posted, anyone registered in the blog can respond. Each "topic" (ie. initial posting) is linked to the responses to that topic with the responses listed from the most recent to the earliest. For example, suppose I were to ask a question about vertex-edge graphs that Karen then responded to--my question would have a link to Karen's response. Allison might read what Karen and I have both written and then write her own response to either or both of us. Now my question would be linked to both responses and Allison's response would be listed first and Karen's second. So it's like having a written conversation involving everyone registered in the blog. Our conversation might be read by other people, but only the people invited to register (who accept the invitation) will has access to adding entries or responses. You can see the list of participants in the blog itself.

Since this is NOT a confidential document, any student identities must not be revealed in any way. We need to discuss how we will handle that at one of our face-to-face meetings. In addition, I am willing to share what I "know" about logging on, registering, posting, etc.

And to save you the need to access the blog every day to see if there have been any new postings or responses, you can do an RSS. Basically this is a subscription to the blog that notifies you whenever there have been any new entries.

So sign on! We have 185 days ahead of us in which to support each other as we attempt to meet the needs of our students and improve our instructional effectiveness!