I'm stalking someone

So in order for me to be more educated on education, I decided that I would find someone who has the same interests as me and use that person as my resource to harness more knowledge. But where on earth was I going to find that person, let alone discreetly? Welll... what better place to stalk someone than the internet? Duh! So I decided to sign up for a social bookmarking website which basically allows me to see other people's bookmarked websites and what kind of tags/comments they labeled to those websites. To find my soulmateI typed in these tags in the search bar: Education, Teaching, Classroom, Teacher, and Reform.

Good news! Based on those tags, I think I've found my social bookmarking soul mate, whose name I will not reveal because (s)he already has enough stalkers (me).

By the way, I am NOT proud to have been reduced to this...



So for the sake of this post, we'll call my social bookmarking soul mate, Oregano. Oregano is hungry for information. By looking at his profile I can see that he bookmarks different articles at least every few days, which is really quite impressive. Having been a member since November 2010, he's accumulated a whopping 1349 articles, mainly about teaching and education, that he's categorized in different tags so that not only is it easy for him to sort through the articles, it's easy for his followers since this is all public. Even more impressively, Oregano actively involves himself in the dialogue about education by posting his own comments on these articles for all of the world to read and ponder about.

I want to share with you guys a couple of his bookmarks that I found particularly interesting:

Twenty Tips for Success for New Teachers
Even for those who aren't teachers, ALL of these tips can still be applied to anybody in any profession. Things like getting a mentor, collaborating others, knowing your passion, and etc are all extremely important to growing personally and professionally.

Seven Ways to Transform Your Classroom
Obviously Oregano is a big fan of lists. This is another equally awesome resource that's definitely more tailored toward the actual classroom.

You know what these links have in common? They both emphasize the importance of blogging! Blogging is extremely important for teachers to reflect, get ideas, and communicate with their students! It's also a fantastic way for students to post their writing and have a real audience beyond just their fellow students and teacher.

Oregano is awesome. He's already shown me how to be a better teacher just by looking at his "Recent Tags" list. Just to share a bit of background about Oregano (but not too much!), he is a school improvement consultant. How cool is that? Through his social bookmarking and me exploiting that, his consulting will reach to even more audiences like you and me. If I wanted, I could go through every 1349 article he has bookmarked and write a different blog post on it.

Thank you Oregano!