About us

We are Daniella Porter and Erin O'keefe, co-directors of Imagine Learning Center in Gainesville, Fl.

Daniella Porter has many years of varied experience caring for and educating young children. She grew up here in Gainesville and has strong roots in the community. She received her Bachelor’s of Arts in Special Education, her Master’s of Education in Early Childhood Education and her Education Specialist in Early Childhood Curriculum from UF.  For the past 8 years she has been researching different curriculum approaches and she opened Imagine Learning Center in 2005, which embodies those approaches.

Erin O'Keefe is the lead preschool teacher and co-director of Imagine Learning Center. She has been an integral part of the school's staff since the center's inception in 2005. She has been educating young children and being influenced by different curricular approaches for the past decade. Her teaching philosophy is strongly influenced specifically by Waldorf, Reggio Emilia and Montessori appoaches, among others.  She holds a bachelors degree in women Studies from S.U.N.Y New Paltz and she recently received her directors credential. 

In conclusion...

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Free sites
www.blogger.com
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www.wordpress.com
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Pay sites
www.typepad.com
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Blogs we love
http://montessoribyhand.blogspot.com/

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http://redbirdcrafts.blogspot.com/
http://scrumdillydo.blogspot.com/

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PubSub (website)
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Technorati
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Our Blog

ImagineLearningCenter.blogspot.com

My inspiration: Why I started the Blog.
      As preschool teachers an important part of our job is having good communication with parents and families. Parents came to me all the time asking what we were doing in class. They all shared a similar frustration of asking their child about their day and not getting a response. I have thought over the years of different ways I could bridge this home/school gap. The blog came out of this need.

      One of the ways I get inspiration for the projects I do with the children is through different craft blogs I have discovered over the years. I was looking at one of my favorites and it occurred to me that I could do a blog too. I figured it couldn’t be that hard. I did some research and found that Google had a blog site that seemed very user friendly .I did my first blog post and made it private at first. I wanted to make sure that I had the permission of the owners of Imagine before I made the blog available for public viewing. It turned out to be a good idea because one of the owners of Imagine had many legal concerns that he needed to think about. He was clear that he was not ok with pictures of the children being on the blog. I wondered if pictures of the children would be ok if we got signatures from all the parents giving their permission for us to use photographs of their children. He still seemed unsure but I figured there would be no harm done to just ask some of the parents to see how they would feel about it. It was interesting because some parents were really ok with it and others were absolutely not. Good to know, great to know, imperative to know. In case you don’t know, it’s not legal to use pictures of children without the written consent of their parents. I cannot emphasize this enough.

      In the beginning I was a bit worried about having a blog without being able to see children’s faces. It seemed so strange to crop their sweet smiling faces out the pictures. Then I realized that the blog wasn’t to show parents cute pictures of their children but to show what their children were doing in the classroom. It was through this understanding that my thinking began to change. I got better and better at taking pictures of the children doing projects without showing their faces. I didn’t need to crop out their faces I just needed to take pictures of small, capable hands involved in meaningful activities.

      The parent’s response to the blog has been very positive. They feel like they are more in tune with the activities their children are partaking in while at school. They feel they have a frame of reference in which to ask question of their children that may result in a response. They also can look at the blog with their child.  I believe that the reason that it is hard for a child to answer questions about their day is because they live in the moment and what happened in the past is less important then what is happening now. When a parent looks at the blog with their children it brings the child back to the moment in a tangible way that really spurs some productive conversation about their time in school.

      The blog celebrated its year birthday in February and I remain it’s very proud Momma. I am always trying to figure out ways to improve on it. Recently I experimented with different ways of editing the photographs. It took more time but I think the results were worth it. I am also starting to add more information for the parents about why we do the kinds of activities we do. I am attempting to make connections between the projects we do and their educational significance.

      When I first started the blog one of my concerns was whether I would be able to keep up with it. I didn’t want to create it, get the parents excited about it and then drop the ball. I have found the opposite to be true in fact. I love doing the blog and feel that it feeds my creativity. The more posts I put up the more projects I want to do, the more blogging about those projects I want to do. My advice to anyone who wants to start a classroom blog and is feeling a bit nervous and apprehensive is try it. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Take a deep breath and jump.

Transparency & Documentation

Transparency is a term used by the Reggio Emilia philosophy to mean many things for a classroom.  In the case of our blog, we are making our teaching and our classroom transparent and using the term as a metaphor for communication.  It is a form of documentation to communicate to parents and those who read our blog about what goes on in our preschool.  We are also participating today in the Reggio inspired idea of making our ideas transparent to those working in the field of early childhood education by sharing our blog with you all. (Authentic Childhood, Gestwicki)

Documentation is providing a verbal and visual trace of the children's experiences and work, and creating opportunities to revisit, reflect, and interpret those experiences. (Authentic Childhood, Gestwicki)

Documentation as communication is a fundamental of the Reggio approach.  Documentation can be a teacher's commentary about the purpose of the work, photographs of the activities, representation of the children's work in various media that are thoughtfully displayed and present the process of learning.  The documentation makes parents aware of their child's experience, it allows teachers to better understand children and evaluate their own work, as well as to exchange their ideas with other educators.  Documentation also shows children that their work is valued and creates an archive that traces the history of the school and the pleasure in the process of learning experiences by many children and their teachers. (Gandini, 1993 - from Bringing Reggio Emilia Home, Caldwell)
Documentation in the form of a blog is another way to bring parents in as partners in their children's educational experiences.

Blog Blog

A blog (a contraction of the term "web log")^[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. (Wikipedia)


The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger^[58] on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the wordweblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.^[59][60][61] Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.^[62]



The Blogosphere

The collective community of all blogs is known as the blogosphere. Since all blogs are on the internet by definition, they may be seen as interconnected and socially networked, through blogrolls, comments, linkbacks (refbacks, trackbacks or pingbacks) and backlinks. Discussions "in the blogosphere" are occasionally used by the media as a gauge of public opinion on various issues. Because new, untapped communities of bloggers can emerge in the space of a few years, Internet marketers pay close attention to "trends in the blogosphere".^[12]


*All the above info came straight from Wikipedia* 


Lots of questions...

Do you know what a blog is?

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If you have a blog, why do you blog?

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