I have discovered several teachers who are posting 180Blogs… Blogs for a 180-day school year. These teachers are basically posting a public diary of their daily math lessons. These blogs serve as terrific professional development for both writers and readers.

In many of the trainings I have conducted, teachers continually want to know how more innovative, activity-based lessons, like those that we publish here at MPJ, fit into the grand scheme of the school year. I thought launching my own 180blog would help answer that question. Today, I beginning sharing it with world: Chris Shore’s 180Blog

The biggest lesson that I learned from the experience so far is that a 180Blog would be awfully dull if all I did everyday was go over homework, share notes on an overhead, and assign odd problems from the textbook. For good or for bad, this blog shows nontraditional methods of teaching, in a very traditional school environment. It shows how the unconventional dovetails with the conventional, the fresh with the mundane.

A few notes about Chris Shore’s 180Blog:

• This blog will unofficially be 94Blog, in that I didn’t start it until this second semester after winter break.
• It took me awhile to work out the technical bugs of hosting it on my school’s site, so I will be launching the first three full weeks simultaneously, and continue from there.
• If I fall behind a day or two, please forgive me. I will make it up on the weekends.
• I plan on being very transparent with the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. You can already see elements of this coming out the gate.
• While I am using my classroom site to host my daily log, I will use the MPJ blog here to expand upon various tools, lessons and methods that I display, as well as ruminations on student understanding and misconceptions.

I would appreciate your feedback on this effort. I hope it is as helpful for you as it has been fun for me.

Other 180Blogs:
Fawn Nguyen (Special thanks for your guidance on mine)
Bowman Dickson
Justin Lanier
Dan Anderson
Sadie Estrella