The Starting Point

     As I prepared for my first year of being an official virtual teacher in our school system's new virtual school, I thought of ways that I can prepare my students for the future, not just academically, but also in equipping them for the innovative society in which we live today. With technology at the forefront of our program, what ways could I utilize technology to teach and enhance their academic growth, yet still make it manageable and age-appropriate?

    I personally had never blogged before, but knew that I wanted my students to create their own blogs imbedded into their digital portfolios.  That meant that I needed to play around with it myself so I could also model for them the expectation. I had previously used Kidblog in my face-to-face classroom, but I wasn't crazy about the changes made to the platform. I wanted something that would not be public, but could be shared with families. Since students would be creating digital portfolios using Google Sites, I decided to add this as a page on their portfolio.

    I set up a Google Site that modeled a blog style writing - my virtual teacher blog - to use as a model for my students.  I think it was helpful to see various layout options and text features.

    Now that we are in our second year as a virtual school, and I am on my second class of virtual "bloggers", I am assisting our staff in beginning a "real" blog to promote the usage of technology in education. I'm still constantly learning in this process, as we all are I am sure! I hope that my experiences can help you somewhere along your journey, and that along with our staff at Empower, we can all become virtual collaborators in this technologically infused world. 

    If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you!

-- Jennifer Pineda