Background
A blog as a learning tool
At the beginning of my teacher training year I started writing a blog on the grounds of creating my mandatory teacher training portfolio later in spring 2006 based on the blog. I thought to myself that should I not write anything down during the year, I probably won’t remember what all has happened during the year.
It was September of 2005, time before smartphones, and I thought about the options I had for storing my notes; I came to the conclusion that using a regular notebook would most likely end up in me losing the notebook at some point.
Back then, unlike smartphones, blogs were becoming a big thing and Blogger was already around so I ended up setting up matikanope.blogspot.fi; ‘matikanope’ stands for ‘math teacher’.
The primary goal of the blog was to be self-documentary. It turned out it attracted some readership later on.
Thoughts on previous blog
Teacher training and the portfolio I was supposed to complete came and went. Nevertheless I continued writing the blog until roughly 2008 after which it has been receiving some comments here and there, mostly regarding some of the (mathematical) riddles I posted on it, for example the well-known Einstein’s riddle and my solution thereof.
What did I learn from writing the teaching related blog then?
- First of all, especially during my first years as a high school teacher I found myself returning to my notes on multiple occasion to refresh my memory on ‘stuff’…just as I had envisioned happening.
- Secondly, writing helps clarify concepts for the writing him/herself. Back in 2004 when taking a course called Object oriented information systems design I recall lecturer Eetu Luoma stating:
If a matter has not been expressed in writing, it has not truly been thought through.
Also, though I was initially writing the blog simply to complete the mandatory portfolio, I noticed others starting to find their way to the blog as well. At some point around 2007 my blog ranked higher than the Helsingin Sanomat (#1 Finnish daily newspaper) website for searches relating to the Finnish high school final exams' mathematics exam related answers. At the time, the Helsingin Sanomat was the de facto standard source for such information. I must admit I was surprised about the Google ranking my blog reached!
Starting afresh, why?
During the past three years I’ve been contemplating starting to write a blog again; so far I’ve always pushed it back, until now.
The goal of the blog is similar to the earlier one as in being a self-documentation platform and also a way of organizing thoughts. On the other hand this time it’ll probably also take on the job of being a publishing platform for thoughts, ideas and programming projects as well as being a form of a CV.
The views presented are my own. You’re invited to comment (once I’ve included a commenting system), either in agreement or disagreement with the views presented.
Some articles will be written in Finnish. The reason for using Finnish would most likely be due to article content being Finland-specific and hardly of much interest to non-Finns.
In case you read this far, wishing you a great day!
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