Education World raves about 30-Minute Websites for Teachers which offers up some basic Website templates that educators can use. Cost: $2,750 annually for 50 teachers. I think I’d rather pay the $299 a year for 3,000 sites with more funtionality and personalization…
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I feel a much needed break from blogging upon me, even though it could get exciting around here when Bryan finishes up his new modular theme for my school site. I’m am itching to start creating, so hopefully it will be soon. One of the theme issues with Manila that’s always been tough is the difficulty in providing pre-created, editable content WITH the theme, for reasons that are too complicated to go into here. But Bryan is working on a solution that could make things much, much easier in terms of personalization. More later…if I can dredge up some energy.
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It’s probably just as well that more and more people are using RSS to read Web logs because then they don’t get to see how bad a page looks when the graphics don’t load. I’m not sure what the problem has been over the last few days, but it’s a nice reminder that just when you start forgetting that technology is not perfect it jumps up and bites you. At least the functionality of the site is ok. Hopefully, the banner will return later today.
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“This project is collaboration produced by the students of the Fall 2003 Introduction to New Media Studies course at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. The purpose of the project is to provide concise reviews of examples of several different “genres” of weblogs.” (via a whole bunch of people.)

Kaye Trammell has been doing what I’ve been doing in my journalism classes in terms of having kids follow a beat in their blogs. She posts some feedback from her students about the exercise here. Even though the results of her end of the semester survey shows some mixed results, some of her classroom bloggers will be continuing their blogging careers with the local Gainsville paper. How cool is that? I have to say that I am more and more impressed with the work my kids are doing. Funny thing is that I ask them to do more posts than Kaye asks of her college kids, although it looks like her students go into a bit more depth. Still, Suzan and Justin and Mandie are doing some awesome work, I think. They make me hope that other students would get into writing about stuff they are interested in. And that’s really what it’s all about…words on digital paper.

This is totally un-Web log related, but just too funny to not share. The following is a piece of an e-mail that our principal received yesterday:

“Dear Ms. Brady,
I discovered that I could receive an accounting of what my son was purchasing for lunch each day. When I received it I was very disappointed to learn that of $200 on his account he spent approx. $17 on Little Debbie cakes, $20 on French Fries, $49 on Soda (Gatorade), $12 on ice cream, $27 on pizza, $10 on pretzels & candy and $57 on lunch. As a result he owes me $143 for his poor choices…”

Sheesh. Now that’s what I call brain food…
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(via Dan Gillmor) “Philly.com is pleased to make RSS files of our content available to users, to facilitate reading the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News in news aggregators.”

This is what it’s going to take for RSS to grow roots. I’m going to have to start a page of nothing but newspaper feeds. (Or maybe someone already has…)
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Things are already crazy enough in my world to be making this blogging stuff feel even more like work than it should. And it’s not surprising that some people give up the blogging ghost for any number of reasons. I’ve been wondering actually how I’ve been able to get in here as much as I have considering the pace of my professional and personal life. (And into what category does this venture fall, anyway?) I think what I realized is that so much of my life is immersed in this stuff that it’s hard to get away from it. And this space has really come to be the place I dump my thoughts and learning and general stuff about how I’m using them. Most people aren’t overseeing 200-plus sites, or creating school newspaper blogs and classroom blogs and student blogs and god knows whatever else. (And, of course, “Teach blogs? Blog.”) Shoot, my wife is even designing Web log Websites for local businesses. What’s next? Scary.

But the other big piece of it, of course, is that I believe in it as a really powerful tool for schools. If I was just keeping a Web log to lament the state of the world, it would be different. Not that there is anything wrong with that, in fact I wish I had the time to do that. But this is more than just writing…
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Ken Smith writes about some potential uses for audio blogging, and I think they’re definitely worth thinking about and expanding upon. He cites the school literary magazine, and I might add the school paper. How cool would it be to add clips of let’s say bands that are featured in stories, or music being reviewed, or excerpts of interviews that kids are conducting? He also writes about getting folks to do short audio clips on specific subjects like getting the most our of college. Heck, we could do a weekly feature of topics like that. And in terms of special projects like the Poland project we’re doing, how cool would it be to actually have the sounds of kids talking about their experiences? I’ve actually experimented just a bit with this at our Voices of Youth blog, but I need to make the process easier.

I need to dig into Bob Doyle’s blogaudio.org site more deeply. But for now, if anyone could suggest some hardware and process links to facilitate all of this, it would be greatly appreciated.

It’s getting to the point where I’m finding just about one new site a day from my referer logs, and today’s winner is the Madison County High School (Va.) Athletics site. I got there from this K-12 Web log workshop page which covers a two-hour training for teachers. It’s great to see more and more of these as well.

One thing struck me as I looked at the workshop schedule, and it’s an element that’s missing from my own workshop materials. That’s a portion dedicated to blogging the verb. Terry‘s back on that important subject, and I’m starting to think that I need to do a lot more to encourage teachers to blog (v) before using a blog (n). I spend a lot of time writing and talking to people about how the tool can help facilitate the teaching process, but not as much about the learning process. I think that’s primarily because teachers have no understanding of using Web logs to learn and reflect simply because they haven’t done it. It goes back to “Teach blogs? Blog!” It’s essential to understand the power of this.

Next time I teach Web logs to teachers, I’m going to ask them to post a week’s worth of reflections to it before giving them their CEUs. That means I get to spend time talking about blogging the verb, which is turning out to be one of my more favorite subjects…

Thank goodness Alan isn’t blogged out yet. This is a great primer for understanding and using RSS. And it’s a work that makes me numb with all of the possibilities here. I feel like I need about a week to diagram all of the connections that could be created with RSS just on our Web site. Yikes. It’s a lot for newbies to handle, despite Alan’s and others’ best efforts, in fact there are a lot of the same issues as Web logs in terms of adoption. The technology doesn’t have a widespread audience yet. RSS and XML and code and all that other stuff make it scary for most (although I think I read recently that there is a rename the RSS contest going on…) And while there are a lot of cool uses already in practice out there, I need to really put together some more ed related ones.

I think the one place to start is in student and teacher research. My journalism kids have actually been using their Bloglines accounts pretty actively. And I think that is what has been driving some of the better blogs that my students have been creating. What I really need to do is show some teachers how they can use it to keep up with their own areas of interest.

I’m hoping that when we get all of the kinks figured out with the Website that it will generate some more interest when people here see what this can do…

Ok, it’s not the most elegant solution, but it’ll have to do. I don’t have the metadata savvy that Seb lent me last year, so the update process is probably more cumbersome than it has to be. But you can pretty much figure out that we start with a separate story page for each story and then start the linkfest. I like it ’cause it’s pretty clean and because I can link my kids blogs to the page. We’re going to link this site to our school homepage later in the week. Now the big issue is finding time to sit down with the newspaper staff to teach them how to do this. It took me about 1.5 hours to transfer everything over, which means that I could probably do it in around an hour next time, which probably means two kids, once they learn it, could easily do it in under an hour. Murphy willing, of course…

Meanwhile, I’m tweaking a new theme that Bryan helped with. Don’t look too hard as it’s filled with pretty much junk at this point. The plan is to keep the top nav bar as the consistent element on every page on the site and then offer up a couple of other variations in color on this theme. Red, black, gray and white aren’t the easiest to make pretty, but I think Bryan did a nice job, as usual.

Terry has his work cut out for him, but I think he’s getting to the heart of the matter with his research questions. I think his second question is the most interesting: “Is this difference one of quality or does it act simply to enhance our traditional writing process goals?” The answer to that question would go a long way to determining whether or not a Web log is more than just a tool. Is it a tool that positively impacts a student’s ability to write?

In that context, I’ve been thinking more about yesterday’s other post about Jill Walker and her network of writers idea. I’m a bit dense sometimes, but that, aside from the creation of an instant audience, seems to be the biggest gift that Web logs can offer to students. It’s the gift that it offers readers, too, the chance to become an active part of the writer’s network. In the past, that network was the manufactured relationship between the writer, the teacher, and perhaps a few peer responders. Maybe the class as a whole. And the connections in that network were tenuous and fleeting. Web logs open up all sorts of new connections that in their asynchronous, archived nature allow for reflection and thoughtful response. And I really think this is were the work of the Web log teacher lies. How do we nurture those connections and allow them to develop and deepen? How do we take a piece of writing or an assignment and help it to evolve from just an isolated text with a beginning and an end into a more dynamic exercise that provides learning and context to the larger network over a longer period of time. Jill says “blogging is not simply keeping an electronic journal, it’s distributed and collaborative; it’s learning to think and write with the network.”

What an interesting concept that is…

From the Nat’l Weather Service Alert for my county (via RSS by the way):

ANY TRAVEL IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED. IF YOU LEAVE THE SAFETY OF BEING
INDOORS, YOU ARE PUTTING YOUR LIFE AT RISK.

Ah, what the hell…they’re young…they’ll get over it.
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…while I dig out of the snow. Here are his first draft questions:

How do weblogs help writers work in ways that are different than traditional writings in traditional formats both formal and informal?

Is the difference one that students experience subjectively but is not demostrable objectively or is the difference for the better both objectively and subjectively showable?

I’m going to let those settle for a while as I warm up in front of the fire. That’s about the only thing I like about snow, you know…you have to build a fire.
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