Pretty good overview, but he doesn’t even consider Manila (though he might after the comments he’s getting.) Even better than the article is the post by Dan Mitchell of DeAnza College (linked here in Best Practices). An excerpt:

This particular class (a GE music course) make extensive use of collaborative learning methods, primarily by putting students into small work groups to complete projects which then became the basis of assignments completed by the entire classs.

When the groups finished their individual work one member from each group posted their assignment on another central class Manila site that was accessible to all students in the class. This posting consisted of a number of questions on topics that the individual groups had focused on. The class then used the same discussion threads to answer the questions. Then the original groups returned to comment on the answers posted by the class and, finally, I posted some wrap-up commentary on each thread.

This is going to help me clarify my own ideas for using Manila with my journalists. (Via Kairos.)
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Ok…my attempt at creating the framework for a weblog/reader’s guide to The Secret Life of Bees is up. (Just click on the title of this post.) Comments, anyone? My thought is to “assign” various aspects to students (chapter summaries, research, character sketches, artistic interpretations, etc.) and then have them post their efforts. The key is to post to a relevant department so that along the way we can look at all the character stuff or theme stuff or whatever stuff in one place and maybe be enlightened. (The departments are listed in the left column.) I like the idea of being the first to do this, both teach the book and create a reader’s guide, and I’m hoping the kids might be into that too. Any/all suggestions greatly appreciated. (Footnote: I called the author’s publicist and left a message…wouldn’t it be fun to have her interact in the site???)

One week left…too many things to do. It’s 6:30 a.m. and I’m already at school, the only one here no doubt. Tied up with yearbook kids all day today. Meetings all day Friday and Tuesday. Slow connection at home precludes any real work on templates or sites over the weekend. And my list is loooonnnggg…Still waiting to hear from Pat about the newspaper template, so that’s kind of on hold (unless of course Joe wants to share his p-machine template which I think he said he got working at some point)…trying to get a weblog/reader study guide site set up for my lit kids to use with our new book The Secret Life of Bees (highly recommended, by the way) and later, Lords of Discipline…trying to figure out the best way to set up my individual logs in journalism since I haven’t been able to get the callback scripts for the template (everyone is too busy these days!)…thinking about the professional portfolio template, the class template, the independent study portfolio/weblog template…hmmm…is there a pattern here? I’ve got weblog fever in a bad way, and I know JUST enough about making them work to make them dangerously intriguing. Should be an interesting few days (and late nights).

Spent the day in a workshop with Charlotte Danielson talking about professional evaluation and what comprises good teaching. It’s really a very straightforward, very logical framework that we’re hoping will make our teacher evaluation programs more consistent across the disciplines. I got a chance to show her my teacher portfolio/weblog idea, and we discussed the portfolio idea at length in the large group. There is no doubt that our administration realizes the benefit of portfolios, so now my job is to convince them that the weblog is a perfect km system to build and revise artifacts of professional development with reflection.

We talked about how portfolios are pretty much done in a vacuum, with only the teacher, potentially a mentor, and a supervisor getting the chance to see the work. Online portfolio/weblogs would allow a much wider audience for feedback and collaboration and publication. It would be easy to manage. It would be fairly easy to create and update. If I can get the gems aspect of Manila going, it could host all sorts of artifacts. I’m almost more excited by the potential here than in the classroom, perhaps because I know everyone has the access necessary to make it work. Now, of course, I have to get crankin’ on my own portfolio! The list grows…

BTW, does anyone out there know how to add a background to a Manila template? I hate being a newbie! (UPDATE: Ken T. set me straight. Nice to have helpful techie friends!)

Anne Davis and Tim Merrit from Georgia State U. have started a weblog on uses in education. Looking forward to their insights and ideas.

It’s frustrating enough taking on one school…must be hell taking on a national organization! “Web workspaces have to be as easily available as paper. Teacher consultants and their students need access to forests and forests worth of digital paper.” Amen.
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This is where we can offer up potential classroom applications, such as:

“Webloggers are becoming the guerrilla warriors of a KM (knowledge management) revolution. And on both sides of the firewall, they and Google are natural allies.”
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I’ve been struggling with how to integrate the weblog into my Lit class, but today I spent a little more time with Dreamcatcher and I think I have an idea brewing. I love the concept of my students building a “Study Guide” for the novels we teach. Here is the basic framework for what they are doing. I’m thinking of creating a weblog for each book, making all the students members, giving them individual topics to post on, and perhaps doing chapter summaries and reactions collaboratively. What if one student did the chapter summary/explication, then other students were able to add comments and other points of view. Could even have one student post summaries of class discussions. Maybe some students could post research about different aspects of the stories. What we would build is a developing resource for the novel and its study.

It might also be interesting to let the kids decide the structure, create the rubrics for assessing the information. More on this later, I’m sure.

Some seriously good stuff concerning implementation which I think I may have linked before. I like this quote from an inside page: “Web logging is seen as a story-telling device in KM - learning and communicating, even collaborating - in an environment that unfolds on a daily basis. A story is being told - both for the creators of the content, and the people who read and discuss that content as it emerges.”
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Some great links to research and practice of professional development portfolios. All deal with higher ed., but many certainly have applications to high school teachers as well.
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I really like the way he has organized his information and the way that he has developed his site into a valuable resource for his students. Interesting starting points for discussions on student portfolios too. But, couldn’t all of this and more be done more easily by teacher and students using weblogs? I definitely want to use some of the ideas when building the teacher template, but this is obviously someone who knows what he’s doing with a computer. (He’s got his own consulting gig going.) I wonder if he knows about Manila?
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A quick search for “weblogs” on ESchool News, Techlearning.com , ITTE, and The Journal, all supposed leading publications in the field of educational technology, comes up with…you guessed it…ZERO responses. I still can’t believe more people haven’t caught on to this.
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I’ve got to figure out how I am going to limit the ability of students not in my classes to create new weblogs. I’m sure at some point word will get out that we now have this weblog feature…I don’t want to worry about finding inappropriate content on our site. Membership is a similar issue…I want to limit it to just the students in my class.
Ken Dow says (at ManilaNewbies): “If you want to strictly control who joins your site, your can turn off Membership to hide the Members box and disable the automated sign up. Then only you can add Members using the Admin page. Remember to bookmark the login page before you try this, or you won’t be able to log in!” Is that the only way to do it, I wonder? That would mean that the teacher would have to put in the addresses and passwords, right? And would the teacher have to create all the sites as well? Any ideas???

Don’t know what happened, but when I tried to edit my post from yesterday, the WYSIWYG editor totally messed it up, and after I fixed it, it wouldn’t repost. (Notice the blank space under Tuesday below.)I have to say that I am liking Manila more and more as I get used to it, but that funky editor is going to be a MAJOR problem if I want to reduce the code that students and teachers have to use in my templates. Very frustrating.
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