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Over the past few years of my time in the blogosphere, I’ve seen some blogs come and go. I’ve seen some great ones start up and hopefully even been able to send out some positive blogging encouragement to some of these folks in the process, either via Twitter or by linking to their blogs. Whatever the case, it’s always encouraging to see new bloggers start into the effort.

With all things, there are numerous people who start out but simply fail to follow through. It’s just the human propensity we have for starting something new and moving on after it loses its newness. I’ve had times in my blogging…

This is a guest post from Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes for OnlineClasses.org, an online college class resource.

Teachers and other education professionals who are interested in starting their own blog or integrating blogging into a classroom can find many online resources to improve their blogging experience. Many of these resources are free and easy to implement on a variety of platforms. Here are 15 no-cost tools to explore today:

Edmodo – This free microblogging platform was created for students and teachers who want to be able to blog and share files through a private connection. Edmodo works a lot like Twitter–it allows threaded replies and a place to share links…

On the day that the iPhone 3G was released, I rushed out to the local AT&T Store to pick up my very own. I was excited, so I rushed home and wrote 10 Awesome iPhone Apps (Band Director Style) and listed all of the cool things that I was going to download and use in class. Well, a year has passed and things have changed somewhat. So I thought I’d go back and look at the list. I was somewhat surprised to see how it has changed and how some of those apps never panned out to be what I thought they would be.

Even so, I am thrilled at the purchase of my iPhone and continue to find it…

If you haven’t visited Angela Maiers’ blog before, you’re missing out. Her blog turned two years old today. She has been blogging for almost as long as I have, and was one of the early commenters on my site who really inspired me to continue pressing on. One of the things I most respect about Angela is her obvious patience with children and her desire for them to be educated as well as they possibly can be. Thanks for everything you are doing for 21st Century Educators, Angela!

Andy Zweibel (whom I’ve been following on Twitter for a while now — @Zweibz7) just started up a blog specifically focusing on topics concerning Music Education students. The blog is MusicEdMajor.net.

Andy is currently seeking contributors for the site, and I think this is definitely a worthwhile endeavor. Hopefully we can get in touch with some music education professors and those who have influence in the music education world to try to get more people on board.

I know a handful of musicians and music teachers are subscribed to my blog and I hope they will give Andy some encouragement, links, and just send people his way.

I also would like to add that he has chosen a very nice,…

This blog is about sharing ideas. The ideas and conversation are far more important than me personally. For that reason, you are hereby free to take any articles or comments that I (Joel) personally have produced for So You Want To Teach?and use them in whatever way you so desire! Call it Open Source Blogging, call it Uncopyright, call it Public Domain. I call it No Rights Reserved.

Absolutely.

Unequivocally.

If you want to take an entire article, or even a series of articles, and publish them in a book, magazine, newsletter, newspaper, ebook, or whatever else (edited or unedited), go for it. Let the information flow!

What if I want to sell [insert witty clever teachery item]?
Feel free…

Recently, Holly left a comment that brought out a few points. I wanted my readers to address her question, and so I posted that question. In the process of doing so, I realized that her comment (and a few others lately) raised a key question for me as to whether or not I should have a codified Comments Policy for So You Want To Teach?

As I’ve been working my way through Darren’s 31 Days to Build A Better Blog project, I’ve been analyzing a lot of things on my site. I’ve come to realize that there are a few things lacking on my blog that a lot of the great blogs I read out there have. With Holly’s question…

This post has absolutely nothing to do with teaching or education. It’s totally about blogging. More specifically, WordPress. If you have not yet discovered the wonders of WordPress, I recommend checking it out sometime.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I’ll start out by listing the hacks that I have done, explaining why I did them, and then explaining how I went about adding them. Here goes:

1. Added a featured article
2. Put Featured & Latest images on home page only
3. Thumbnails of all images in main and archive pages
   
4. Moved most ads to search visitors only
5. Added social media links to individual posts and searches
6. Retweet button
   
7. Reader submitted links page
8. Added links to the

…

It all started innocently enough. As a band director, I have been to numerous rehearsals of orchestras, jazz bands, mariachis, bands, and even choirs. So when Mr. Teacher (of www.learnmegood.com) asked me if I wanted to join him for choir practice, I was excited.

“Well, I was just watching these 100 Free Online Lectures that Will Make You A Better Teacher. But I have a few minutes to spare. Wait a minute, I didn’t know you could sing!” I responded.

“I doesn’t,” was the puzzling reply.

Thus began the longest day of my life

If I had simply pulled out my handy New Revised Teacher Dictionary, I would have known I was in for way more than I had bargained…

Turns out I’m not the only teacher out there who gets so busy teaching that he overlooks his blog somewhat. Perhaps you can relate. Oh, I’m sure you can! It happens to us all. We get bogged down with so many things in our life that the unimportant things shift to the back. Hopefully.

Sometimes if we’re not careful, we let the important things shift to the back-burner. That’s an altogether different problem there…

But now that I have a new design for my blog (that is growing on me more and more each day, by the way), I am inspired to get things really running on all cylinders. Or at least one a few more.

So I got a…

2008 was the first full calendar year that I ran this blog. It saw its ups and downs, and in some senses, it was a sort of anticlimactic year as far as my personal blogging habits went. Nevertheless, So You Want To Teach? continued to flourish.

January began with my hosting the Carnival of Education. That was also the kickoff of my new WordPress theme, which I had personally designed and kept playing with throughout the year. To this date, I still have not seen a blog theme even remotely similar to it. But I will be putting the SYWTT 2008 theme to rest sometime next week. More info on that later.

As I mentioned in the last article, the…

A Matter of Priorities
During my first two years of teaching, I discovered that I had a whole lot of information, but the students just weren’t listening to me or learning from me. It is not, mind you, because I was giving them wrong information. It was, however, because I had placed the priorities in the wrong order. When we have the proper perspective, we will end up teaching far more than we ever imagined we might teach.

And so began the very first post on the blog that would turn into So You Want To Teach? That was posted two years ago today, on February 11th, 2007. Over the remainder of this month, I will be looking back at…

In case you missed it, the February 2009 edition of the Music Education Blog Carnival is up over at The Collaborative Piano Blog.

The carnival is still going strong after its 8th edition, and it’s exciting to see it perpetuating! Join in for the March edition.

1. July 2008 - So You Want To Teach? (22 submissions)
2. August 2008 - MusTech.Net (14 submissions)
3. September 2008 - Amy M. Burns (16 submissions)
4. October 2008 - Teacher in a Strange Land (16 submissions)
5. November 2008 - Composing Like Mad (13 submissions)
6. December 2008 - Discover, Learn, Play (12 submissions)
7. January 2009 - Theresa White’s Education In Music (15 submissions)
8. February 2009 - The Collaborative Piano Blog (26 submissions)

Don’t forget to submit your favorite blog article to the March…

I have an admission. If you’ve emailed me in the last year or so, you may have caught on. The thing is…I am behind. On like everything.

With work, church, and mariachi, I tend to remain pretty busy. But when I’m home, often I will sit here looking at blogs, playing catchup in Google Reader or my email, checking my blog stats, checking out Facebook, chatting with friends, and doing all sorts of time-wasting things. These things are all right in and of themselves, but when combined, they lead to me neglecting things such as basic housekeeping, laundry, filing my bills, cooking, and even sleeping.

Then I find a burst of energy, sit down, start sorting through my emails, and…

My buddy Mr. D who writes I Want To Teach Forever has started up a little project this year that I hope lasts all year. He is asking teachers to email him and write a guest post for him about “What is the most important advice you can give to other teachers?” The project is 52 Teachers, 52 Lessons.

I will obviously be submitting an article to the project (I had intended to do so before the end of December, but it didn’t work out). I wanted to provide him with a larger audience of people who might potentially write an article for him and get featured in this project that is sure to be a valuable addition to the…

Over the last almost two years that I have been reading and writing blogs, I have come across a handful of lists of Top Education Blogs. Normally, I discover them when I either get a trackback or (more commonly) when a pagr refers someone over to my site. The latter was the case today.

As far as the rankings I’ve seen before, this one was the most intriguing. Instead of simply using Technorati data or any type or arbitrary kind of thing, Jason Falls (an outsider to the world of edublogs) pulled a list of 150 EduBlogs, and ranked them based on reader interaction over the past 30 days through Postrank.

All in all, it is definitely an intriguing methodology…

Go read my first publicly available narrative account of my teaching career. The Great Guest Fiasco of 2009 was just posted at Learn Me Good.

If you are going to be student teaching in the spring semester of this school year, I want you to contact me. Before the end of this month. I am beginning work on a major project that will benefit you (and other students) tremendously.

Either comment or email.

The 5th edition of the Music Education Blog Carnival is up over at Composing Like Mad. Be sure to check out the wonderful music education resources and also submit your own article for the December Edition.

Also, if you are a music educator and you blog, let Joseph know and join us in our effort to have 100 ME bloggers signed up by the end of December. Only 13 more to go!

The 4th edition of the Music Education Blog Carnival is up over at Teacher in a Strange Land. Our beloved host Nancy asks the question, “What five songs on your iPod do you consider guilty pleasures?”

It’s difficult to boil it down here with over 11,000 tracks (somewhere around 5,000 songs and 6,000 sermons) on my iPod, but I’ll see what I can come up with.

Here they are:

1. The Devil Went Down To Georgia performed by Mariachi Sol De Mexico
   The song itself is not too off target for a Texas boy, but the fact that I recorded this off of a live performce video on YouTube makes it all the more funny. Mariachi Sol De Mexico’s

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