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I’ve been preparing myself for my Volunteer trip to Kenya where I’ll be teaching in Children’s Centres in Mombasa for 6 weeks. To do this I’ve been doing the pre-departure course work from Global Vision International on Teaching English as a Foreign Language and I’ve picked up a few resource books myself. One in particular, “The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide,” seemed appropriate not only for my trip but for my own career at home as ELL students are numerous in the schools that I have worked at.

The authors of this book, Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski, start off this guide by outlining the three R’s that make up a positive and effective learning environment. Relationships, Resources and Routines. What I failed to notice, and what these authors pointed out to me, was that blogging is an easy and effective way to show students you care about them inside and outside the classroom.

“In today’s world, many teachers already blog and write about their teaching experiences. However, they may not take the extra step of sharing this writing with their students. This can be powerful on a number of levels, but in terms of relationship building, it shows students that the teacher things of them outside of the classroom.”

They are so right. Whenever students would ask me about Twitter I would usually say, “Yes I have Twitter and even a blog, feel free to follow me but I tweet and write about education/teacher stuff – you might not be interested.” But, students should see you on Twitter and your blog posts because it shows students how methodological you are in how, what, where and why you teach and how you learn.

I did have students come up to me one day and say they found me on Twitter and that I tweeted a picture of my water bottle from class (students put a post it note on it reminding me to drink more water and not just coffee). I explained to them how happy that post it made me, because even within our short two weeks together we had a community started where we took care of each other and got to know each other. I thought it was wonderful.

I now realize that this twitter-verse and blog-overse is not just for me to develop and network with other teaching professionals. But is also a way to show how connected we are with our students and that we are very focused on doing our very best to provide our students with classrooms we feel they deserve.

“Taking a few minutes to write about the class (whether it is a simple reflection on how a lesson went, how a student demonstrated an exceptional insight, or sharing a few success and challenges from the week) and then sharing this writing with the class can increase trust and respect between the teacher and the students.”

So I’m urging teachers! Please, if you don’t have time to blog – because yes, it does become something of another job on its own, please tweet! Share your thoughts, your learning moments, things that inspire you and ways to change our classrooms for the better! Use hashtags to join the conversation!

Here’s a reminder though, Hashtags are only as effective if they are being used! They can be great promotional tools for an upcoming school wide event, a district initiative, or if theres a topic you want to really learn/chat about with other professionals about. This is why some districts, like Surrey, can be so connected on Twitter because they seem to have agreed upon hashtags for their district that they use: #sd36learn #surreylearns #sd36 #edcamp36

So, If you can’t blog, tweet! Even 150 characters can go a long way to show that you are connected, learning, and caring about your students and your school. Adding a hashtag in between those 150 characters will help your thoughts be found and connected with in a much more efficient way too!