Still Putting It All Together

So, I’ve been a total, well, first year teacher this last semester. I feel entirely disconnected from all things education related (policies, research, etc…) that don’t have anything to do with my classroom/school, Pinterest, and Tumblr. If you could recommend a few professional journals, blogs, newspaper columns, etc. that I could read weekly to help keep me in the loop, I’d appreciate it :)

I hope you don’t mind that I copied and pasted this into a new post — I wanted it to be reblogable.

I am a member of the International Reading Association .  They are behind the awesome website Read Write Think. Org which has a ton of great ideas for free (even non-members)!  It costs to be $29.00 to be an online member ($39.00 for basic $24.00 for students, including grad students).  You pay additional for each journal you want access to.  If you want print copies of it and not just online copies, you have to choose basic, and you pay a little more for the journals.  I think it is worth it.  I’m more likely to read the print copies.  It is also easier to keep them organized rather than random papers all over the place.  I subscribe to The Reading Teacher which is for teachers of students up to the age of 12, but they also have the Journal of Adolescent & Adult literacy and Reading Research Quarterly.  I love The Reading Teacher — it gives you research based ideas, and is written in a format that makes it easy to imagine how certain ideas can work in your classroom.  Membership and subscription also gets you access to online archives.

Click below for more resources.

I also am a member of the National Association for the Education of Young Children.  They have two journals, one for preschool and one for elementary grades.  I subscribe to the one for the elementary grades, but find that they often put prek articles in there as well.  That used to irk me, but now that I teach prek I am fine with it.  If you have to choose between the two, I’d go with the IRA.  NAEYC is costly, and I find the other journal more useful.

For education news, Education Week is a must.  You need a membership to read full articles, but free accounts are available.   This will cover the most important Education-related news, but may miss more local stories.  It is a good site to add to your Google Reader, which is how I manage reading the different sites and blogs I follow outside of Tumblr.

Other Education news resources:

Teaching Tolerance (news, issues, lesson ideas)

L.A. Times: Education (not that I am always a fan of their approaches)

Some blogs I highly recommend for the ideas and resources they provide:

(I have a lot more that I like, but I am getting sleepy — ask me again another day).

Finally, there are two blogs that I love mostly for their stories (although they do give me good ideas sometimes).  They remind me of the parts of teaching I love — so I turn to them on my rough days.