Connected Educator Month: Blogs To Follow

Connected Educator Month kicked off yesterday. Not familiar with CEM (or #CE12, the official twitter hashtag)? It’s an effort started by the Department of Education and seized upon by multiple online personalities with the sole purpose of encouraging teachers to connect and expand their personal learning networks (PLNs).

If you’ve followed us at all (and if you haven’t, you really need to subscribe!), you know how deeply we believe in the power of PLNs. Ours has transformed the way we teach, and that’s not an exaggeration. From our PLN we get daily inspiration, motivation, and much more.

So if you’re already a connected educator (and if you’re reading this, chances are, you are), take some time this month to help connect a colleague or a friend. Not sure how to do that? Start by pointing them in the direction of the #CE12 hashtag. I challenge anyone to browse that stream for a few minutes and not find something of value. (Go on, try it! You’ll see what I mean.)

Now that you have them interested, take some time to help them get comfortable connecting. Share your own tips and tricks. Be a mentor and talk to them about what you’re learning from your connections. Help them build the habits necessary to effectively connect. Taking the time to support and help with connecting will pay huge dividends.

During the month of August, we’ll be sharing posts on the value of connecting, as well as tips, tricks, and commentary about the value of online connections for teachers. In addition, we’re partnering with our friends at Ten Marks to give a platform to the founders of several twitter chats. We want them to tell you in their own words how amazing chats, twitter, and connecting can be.

To kick things off, we’d like to share some of our favorite blogs to follow. Reading blogs is one of our absolute favorite things to do. In fact, it’s possible that I’m hooked on blog reading. If you follow us on twitter, you know we tweet a lot of resources and helpful blog articles. Where do we get these wonderful toys? From our Google Reader, of course.

So today, for the first time ever, we’re going to give you a peak inside our Google Reader, the source of vast quantities of awesomeness. Take a look at these blog bundles I’ve created. If you’re a Google Reader user (and if you’re not, you should be!) you can subscribe to all of the blogs with just one click. If you’re not, these links will at least give you the names of the blogs we follow, along with a sampling of the content many of them have to offer.

• Blogs to follow–a huge collection of pretty much every education-related blog I’m subscribed to. (NOTE: To spare you from redundancy, this bundle includes pretty much all of the blogs in the next two bundles.)
• Education Inspiration–These are mainly blogs that contain commentary and thoughts about education reform.
• Tech Centric–These are all related to educational technology.
• Literacy–Blogs about books for kids, ELA teaching ideas, and all things reading and writing.
• Teacher Librarians–A handful of blogs created by my teacher librarian idols.
• Engage the Common Core–Our secret vault of Common Core awesomeness
• Homeschool–Blogs about and for homeschooling families.

If you’re not a Google Reader user yet and you’d like to be, and did I mention you should be?…check out our two-part Google Reader tutorial. Here’s PART ONE and here’s PART TWO.

And stay tuned for scads more goodies and fun stuff all month long in celebration of Connected Educator Month!