Blogging is to learning as...

I have honestly always been interested in writing a blog-and always envied those who did. My first issue...I didn't even know how to start a blog! Well, that was sure cleared up during the first evening of class. Come to find-it was super easy, almost embarrassingly easy. Second issue...I have no time these days. Luckily, I had to make time to blog for my Social Studies class this summer. I have always been pretty consistent at keeping a written journal, mostly since high school and beyond. These were my private thoughts that I didn't share with anybody. So this on-line blogging thing is a bit different. First, I am not so much as writing about my private thoughts and secrets, but more so my personal views and experiences. Second, I can allow numerous people access to view these writings. I like these different takes on my journal writings. It challenges me to talk about issues that other people are interested in (whether they agree with my view or not) and to also word it in a way that is thoughtful and academic. I really hope to keep blogging throughout my student teaching, first year on the job, and well into my career. While we were required to mainly write about social studies these past six weeks, I hope to incorporate other educational issues, research, and teaching strategies into my future blog posts.
For the purpose of my social studies class, blogging gave me the opportunity to reflect on the readings, lessons plans, and teachings (among other things- such as become more technologically savvy-it is 2010 for Pete's sake!). I understand that reflection is critical to my future as an educator and the more practice, the better I'll be at it. Reflecting is somewhat natural to me, but blogging helped me to put my thoughts into words as well as have them recorded for me to refer back to. I also found it interesting to read other classmates' posts (when I had the time, of course!). I can honestly say I do not see any way that blogging has hindered my learning experience in my social studies course.
While the title of the course gave some insights as to what I would be learning (Integrating Social Studies and the Arts) I now realize just how easy it is to incorporate social studies throughout the school day into a wide range of content areas and topics. Since social studies is not tested in North Carolina, it is easy for teachers to push the subject aside and focus on the subjects that are tested, specifically mathematics and literacy. While I am not saying that these two subjects are not important or even that social studies is more important than math and language arts, I am saying that it is just as important. There are a number a ways to meet English Language Arts objectives and Social Studies objectives in the same unit, in the same lesson. As a pre-service teacher about to enter my student teaching, I will make a huge effort to bridge the gap between social studies and other content ares. We are ultimately teaching our students how to be responsible and informed citizens of their community, state, and country. How can we do that when we push social studies down to the bottom of the totem pole?