Are you a teacher who is looking for easy ways to make your practice more impactful? Keeping an interactive digital record (a blog) of your thoughts and observations is a great way to expand your practice and reach more people. Blogging can be incorporated into the learning environment to expand the knowledge and skills of teachers by sharing sources of information for other teachers (Sahin-Topalcengiz et al., 2020), and by sharing technological resources and insights, we foster a community of more engaged educators and employees who in turn improve the experiences of others (Xie et al., 2021). You've learned so much from personal experience, why not reach outside of your personal network with your insights in written form?
Think about how deeply you've researched or studied topics per week during your planning time, or even in person with your students. You are the Subject Matter Expert (SME)! You have the unique advantage of thousands of hours of observation and repetition, and your insights not only help your teaching practice and students, but can help others in your situation. How many observations do you have that simply aren't on any literature that has been presented to you thus far? By taking this proactive measure, you and others can effectively impact the field of education by presenting pressing issues stemming from real-time problems that you've personally observed. Your personal contributions in web-based communities give researchers and other stakeholders palpable anchor points to launch new prospective studies from. Feel free to find a host that suits you. For example, this blog is on Wix.com, but Wordpress.com is popular as well. You could even potentially use social media sites that store data long-term such as instagram.com or facebook.com as platforms as long as you post consistently, and provide public pages. In a virtual blog for my former students, I created an art learning instagram page that most of my students followed. I often shared reels from world-class museums and posted a string of posts featuring student work and exhibitions. Feel free to take technology into your practice and use it in authentic ways to benefit yourself or your students, and share those insights with other educators when you can so that even more students can benefit from your unique perspective.
References
Sahin-Topalcengiz, E., & Yildirim, B. (2020). Teachers' opinions about distance Web 2.0 tools training and teachers' in-class Web 2.0 practices. Journal of Turkish Science Education (TUSED), 17(4), 561–577.
Xie, J., A, G., & Rice, M. F. (2021). Instructional designers’ roles in emergency remote teaching during COVID-19. Distance Education, 42(1), 70–87. https://doi.org/10,1080/01587919.2020.1869526