Thank You Ms. Dosanjh

My grade one students have had individual blogs since the fall.  They write on them fairly regularly (although there are a very large number of unfinished posts sitting in the draft folder), and people other than myself and my student teacher do read them from time to time. They even get comments.  But like any other blossoming writers, they would love to have more comments.

As I was packing my bag for my  Spring Break adventure I received a notification e-mail telling me that a blog comment was waiting to be approved and posted.  To my surprise it was from Ms. Dosanjh, a grade three teacher from a school in my district.  Ms. Dosanjh and I have never met (and from what I can tell she isn't on Twitter either) but some how she found out about me, my class blog, and my students' blogs.  Her comment was letting me know that she had asked her students to comment on my students' blogs as a way to give them practice at commenting.   I didn't think much of it at first until the comments started coming.

Every morning while on my adventure I checked for e-mails and sure enough there were comments from at least one of her students.  Jessica, her star commenter, commented on every one of my students posts.  Or if she didn't hit everyone she was really close. The thing with Jessica is that she really tried to connect with my students' writing.  Her comments often began with, "I connect to this post because...". It was really quite incredible to read them all.

While the increased number of comments for my students has been fantastic, I think what's coolest about all of this is the connections that are being formed.  Not just with  Ms. Dosanjh and I but across our school district.   People are getting to know one another better. We are sharing our ideas and collaborating.  While I'm a lot more out there than I've ever been before, the power of these connections has been really quite incredible.

Being out there, having this blog, and tweeting on twitter has really changed a lot of things for me this year and I am very thankful for that.   Despite the awful political climate in British Columbia, something really exciting is  happening in my school district and it's wonderful to be a part of it.  As I read in one of  Dr. Carlson's tweets today, "It's contagious and rippling across the district".  I'm excited to be a part of this movement, and I'll happily drag everyone with me.  Thank you Ms. Dosanjh for joining the train.