I finally got around to tweaking the RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators I put together a few months ago. It had a few mistakes and the section on search feeds for Google News had instructions that no longer worked. Let me know if there are any other updates that might be required.

Anne got a comment on one of her class blogs from the author of a book her students were reading, and subsequent e-mails seem to have laid the groundwork for the author’s participation when Anne’s new students read the book next year! How cool!

After the NECC presentation last week a couple of people asked me how I managed to bring an author and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist into my Weblogs to work with my kids and I just said “I asked.” I think by and large, people outside of school want to work with students, and if we can give them an easy way to do it… Lately I’ve been stuck on this idea (hope?) that the contrived learning experiences that we create for our kids in our classrooms may finally be tossed aside for some real world, constructivist, engaged learning. Not to say that many teachers haven’t done yeoman’s work with projects and plans that capture kids attention and provide great learning opportunities. But I keep wondering, from whom would I rather have my students learn journalism? Me? Or me assisted by a group of professionals offering up some real world perspectives on the topic, engaging in dialogue about real hurdles and struggles, collaborating on the writing process, and celebrating in the publication of real student writing for a real audience? Um, gee…

As my colleague said in the video, this IS what’s transforming the classroom, being able to bring the world into the classroom on a daily basis. And the potential implications of that for students and teachers are HUGE.

More to come…
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Amazing…a million hits to the Bees site. Now I know that doesn’t mean a million visitors, but still.

Equally if not more amazing…this is the 2,020th piece of content added to this site since I started the Manila version on July 30, 2002. Combine that with earlier iterations of Weblogg-ed and, well, this has turned out to be quite a hobby.

Last year at this time I was in the throes of horrible site migration problems after our Frontier box here at school crashed and I was trying to scrape the remains off to Weblogger where, I’m happy to say, I’ve had a year of trouble free hosting. Last July, this site was dead for about a month, and it was really, really difficult not to be writing.

All of this is making me want to reflect on all of this blog work in some grander way. I wish there was an easier way in Manila to just scroll through posts without forcing the homepage to load 365 days worth of content. It would be great at times just to do a nice, long bottom up scan to get a better context of where I’ve been and maybe identify places to go. I would love to be able to take two or three days and do nothing but read and reflect and rebuild some of the pages on this site, but getting that big of a chunk of time is probably not in the cards.
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I always perk up when I see any of these tools being discussed in the K-8 realm since I would love to my high school students come to class with some online publishing experience. Just so happens that in my wanderings today I landed on wikiweb.org which is “exploring uses of wikis within K-6 education.” Very cool!
A little digging suggests it’s put up by Eric Unangst of the Berkshire School District in Burton, Ohio. (Dig around his site a bit and you’ll see all sorts of other great resources and ideas.) At any rate, it appears Eric is looking for collaborators.