Didn’t get away much this summer what with the new job and everything else that always seems to be going on. So we’re escaping for a long 4-day weekend to Chincoteague Island. (Sorry, Pat…the Jersey shore just isn’t for me.) It’s going to be really weird starting the school year NOT in the classroom. After 20 years of navigating the mayhem that is opening day, it will be nice to just kind of sit back and watch. In fact, I’m coming in late the first day because I want to see Tess board the bus for the first time as she heads to first grade. My little girl…sniff. Anyway, will probably not be posting ’til sometime next week.
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Lila Efimova and Sebastien Paquet (among others) are working through some issues with Trackback, and lately I’ve been thinking about how it might be used in my classroom. One thing I think I like about the concept is that it would allow students to put feedback comments into their OWN Web logs which would then show up as a Trackback link for the student at which the comment was directed. (Does that make any sense?) That’s potentially a good thing from an assessment standpoint. One of the clunkier parts of the paperless, Manila Web log infused classroom is keeping track of a student’s work that doesn’t end up in her own space. It would be better if ALL efforts that a particular student was making, be it homework or projects or feedback, ended up in the same place. The downside, obviously, is that the feedback a student receives would not be as well-organized and as easily readable as Trackback doesn’t seem to include entire posts. (Is there a tweak for that?)

The other avenue here is being able to RSS-ify comments which would mean the feedback would be aggregated by the student who is receiving it. I think there is a way to do that, but I haven’t found the answer yet. Again, that’s not the best way for a student to be able to organize the feedback he receives, but at least it does solve that scattered work issue. Any ideas anyone?