My “Teacher’s Toolbox” workshop concluded yesterday on what I would consider a pretty good note. We didn’t get to Wikis or Webnote or Flikr, but we did dig in pretty deep to Bloglines and Furl. As I told the group when we finished, at the very least I wanted them to leave with an understanding of what RSS can bring to teacher practice and student learning. I think I accomplished that. We’ll see if they keep using the tools, but I’ve already decided to send them an e-mail every day for a couple of weeks reminding them to get in there and poke around some more.

The most interest came from two English teachers whose students are doing research papers. They could see how the standing search feeds could have some usefulness, and they were interested in having me help them set them up for their kids. And I think they all thought the idea of Furling sources and letting their students get those sources via RSS was an intriguing idea. So at least conceptually…

One pleasant discovery was that Looksmart (who know owns Furl) has RSS feeds for the publications in their database and also for searches. (Check under the Articles tab.) Now I know that their archive usually runs about six months behind, so I’m not sure if the RSS feed will bring the new articles as they are posted, meaning it would probably update once a month. As to the search, I put a couple in my Bloglines account to see what happens.

(And, in case anyone is interested, we found out that AllRecipies.com, Bigoven.com, Asian Online Recipes and Real Cajun Recipes.com have feeds for foods…cool!)

A couple of new sites offering free Weblog and Wiki space for teachers have sprung up of late. Hopefully it’s the start of a bigger movement.

James Farmer has put up IncSub which is offering a whole slate of tools from WordPress to Drupal to Tiki and even phbbb for bulletin boards. I think this is a great offer and no doubt James would be happy to hear from teachers who are interested.

The other is a site I mentioned a couple of days ago, VisitMyClass. I met Jim Wenzloff at the Building Learning Communities conference earlier this year, and he’s taken it upon himself to offer this space to teachers and students in his area of Macomb County, Michigan. Also, he’s looking for some educators to provide feedback to students on their blogs:

I think one of the power of blogs is that it is a way for students to publish their work and to receive feedback on what they have written. The question is how do you attract visitors to your blog that will make appropriate comments? We don’t want to beat students into the ground on their first try.

I am proposing setting up a network of people who would be willing to comment on one or two pieces of student writing a month. The teacher would request feedback and give some guidelines to help the reader. The reader would look at one or more pieces of writing and make their comments. I am setting up a listserv for this purpose.

So I started a new “Teacher’s Toolbox” workshop last night with five brave souls, regaling them in the wonders of the RSS/Wiki/Furl/Bloglines/del.icio.us thing. Coincidentally, Alan and Brian were doing something similar at Educause, albeit with much more organization and preparation. Frankly, I didn’t quite know how to approach it; there seems to be a very fine line between inspiration and overwhelm-ed-ness when it comes to these topics. So I ended up giving them the tour yesterday with the idea of putting them to work tomorrow night when we finish. And I think it went pretty well; just a little bit of glazed eye syndrome when we were done.

But the interesting thing, at least to me, is that I felt so far removed from what their reality is with all of this is. At one point I just decided to give them a five minute “here’s how this stuff works for me” demo and I have to tell you, I felt like an alien. Not that this group isn’t smart or open to technology. But I guess what struck me on the way home was how many hours of reading and experimenting and tweaking and thinking I’ve put into this with the real belief that these tools (or at least the concepts) are potentially important for teachers and students to understand. And I guess I’ve been immersed in them for so long, and they have become such an important part of my routine, that I kind of lose sight of the fact that in a school of almost 300 professional staff members, I’m the only one (save a couple of people who I have accosted in the hallways) who has really incorporated any of these tools into my work. And so I can’t help but go back to that “What’s it all mean?” place where I wonder if 10 years from now I’ll look back on this and go “Why? Why? Oh why?”

Ok…maybe that’s a bit dramatic.

But still. The workshop group talked at the end about whether there should be a class in these types of tools for kids, and I said that the class would probably be about 30 minutes long. (Ironically, just yesterday I was reading the Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants piece by Marc Prensky where he talks about the different approaches to technology that teachers have as opposed to their students.) These kids would just “get it” from a user standpoint. But what they wouldn’t have are good models to show them how to use the tools for critical thinking and reading and writing and for making sense of information. And to do that, we need teachers who are willing to integrate the practice into their own routines and teach to a student’s future, not his past.

Ok…maybe that’s a bit dramatic, too.

But that’s where my disconnect lies…my jump up and down “wait ’til you see what you can do with this!” blogvangelist self vs. the reality of the classroom. There is this whole sea change in technology in general underway, all these new tools and ideas. It’s fun to be immersed in, at least for me. But I have to keep reminding myself that much of it doesn’t translate as easily as I want it to.

So I notice in my Bloglines account that people have been posting Webnotes to my notes page, and I click on one of the links that someone left and see that a screen shot of one of my notes has been blogged here and that the author actually added her note to a different screen shot she got from here.

Hmmm…

More from the Weblog in schools research front from Jason Ward of the American University Sharjah who writes about “Blog Assisted Language Learning (BALL): Push button publishing for the pupils.” I think that it does a pretty good job of reinforcing what were starting to know about Weblogs and blogging, namely that for blogging to be effective we need to ask students to use it in authentic and personally meaningful ways, and that we’re always going to struggle with the disconnect that arises when we assign it and evaluate it.

In order to get my students blogging, I started out by designing an assignment with one eye on the syllabus and the other on the ‘blogsphere’ to come up with the topics of news, views and reviews. I wanted the students to respond to an item in the news; articulate their opinions about an issue of their choosing; and critique a film and a book. I chose these topics because they were ‘authentic’; that is they commonly appear on weblogs, and also because of several communication needs that needed to be addressed in the course. In order to have sufficient time to develop, the weblog was introduced at the beginning of the course and collected at the end. There were also a couple of posting deadlines to ensure that the students had started posting their blogs.

He also touches on the idea that even “coerced” blogging, while not staying totally true to the ideal, can have some lasting benefit a la the “at least we’re getting them to think and act like bloggers” effect. Read, synthesize, reflect, read.

However, coerced-blogging can still produce excellent weblogs, and hopefully some students will continue their blogs after assessment. Furthermore, their membership of this growing discourse group may help to develop their communicative skills beyond their Com 101 class. In such classes, blogging could help to provide some relief from English class clichés, such as the standard 5-paragraph essay, and provide the students with a genuinely communicative environment to express themselves more naturally and fluently.

I’m rolling up my sleeves to see if I can’t do some classroom research on blogging (v.) with one of the media lit teachers next quarter.
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Ran across a site called “Visit My Class” that seems to be offering up free Weblog space for educators. While there, I found this post from Chris Burnett:

It amazes me how feedback from someone other than “The Teacher” can motivate a student! This morning there were a few feedback comments and I read them to the class. I did that mainly to let the kids know that someone other than me is reading their writing. If you ever wanted to see a room of 28 8th graders be stone silent, you should have been in my classroom this morning. A couple of the kids actually looked at the computer to make sure I wasn’t making any of this up. Now I discover that there are about 15 feedback comments for my kids and I can’t wait to get to school tomorrow and read them out loud. I think a new morning activity has been created…”Let’s find out what people had to say!” My kids have been told all too often that “They can’t” and now I can show them that “They can!” Thanks to all who have commented on their writing. Your comments are priceless. With each piece that my kids write, they will get better.

The power of audience revealed, and one of the best parts of Weblogs. Good stuff.

But contrast it to this from Kairosnews:

I used to love blogs. I thought they were going to be the Next Great Thing to introduce in the classroom. After three semesters, however, blogs are losing their lustre. Students are confused by them, unable to write, paralyzed with fear of blogging, or they are already light years ahead of the class with their own LiveJournals which have all the bells and whistles.

I have discovered that my honeymoon with blogs is over, mostly because there really is no room for spirited interaction between my students and myself in the blogs. Yes, I can require that they respond to another person’s blog, but one student said that, compared to a discussion forum, leaving responses to blogs felt more like leaving a note for someone who is out. The discussion forum, she said, felt more like an ongoing conversation which was more fun.

I agree with this sentiment, to some extent. Discussion is hard to get started in blogs, and it just doesn’t work if it’s forced or required. I mean it’s fine if you want students to respond to pieces of writing, as a way of archiving feedback. Sustaining a back a forth conversation on a blog post is not easy, however. But having said that, I’m not sure how a discussion board is any better…

Look, the strength of Weblogs lies in the blogging process, the reading, thinking, writing, publishing, responding process. But to get students to do that effectively, we have to be able to let them own their own spaces by allowing them to write about their own passions and develop their own audiences. That’s a tougher task, no doubt, than asking for specific responses. But I still believe we can nurture those spaces, and at least expose them to the possibilities.

So I’m liking playing around with Webnote. But I gotta tell you, it’s pretty wierd to be putting up stuff to my note page only to come back and find someone has come in and neatly arranged everything in tight blocks instead of the much less organized overlapping mess of posts I had created. Add to that the fact that when you Google Webnote, my note page comes up second on the list… I haven’t quite figured out the reload function that I guess, like a wiki, could get me back to my last saved note. But, so much for sharing the URL with just the people I want.

(Oh, and by the way, the New Note button with the auto link is working in IE.)
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This is a very appealing overview of RSS, now being brought to you by the mainstream magazine media:

An amazing number of places now use RSS “feeds” to distribute information, including The New York Times and Yahoo News. The National Weather Service uses RSS to send out alerts. And the Surrey (England) Police Department uses RSS for its lost-and-found. In addition, RSS can be built into your computer applications. Picture the following scenario: when your kid’s soccer game changes location, your personal calendar is automatically updated to reflect the shift, because you’re a subscriber to the soccer league’s RSS feed.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I think it’s pretty fun to think about where RSS might be in a few years… I’ve just got to get the parents at my school onto this.
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So I’ve been going back and forth a bit with Tony Chang who is the developer of WebNote and he’s actually added some functionality that I’ve asked him for. (That’s one of the great things about this burgeoning community. People like Mark Fletcher at Bloglines, Mike Giles at Furl, Greg Gershman at Blogdigger…they all have been very willing to seek out our ideas and suggestions. Very cool.) He’s created a “New Note” button that I can click on my toolbar to automatically save anything I’ve highlighted to my note page, and he’s also made it so it saves with the link, at least in Firefox. (He’s working on IE.) So, I’ve been adding notes to my page for the last few days, and I think I’m starting to see some potential for this. It’s nice to be able to grab snippets of information and store them to a Web page where I can get at them from my other computers.

Interestingly, I like the way this works in Firefox better than IE. I can drag the notes around very easily, making my page as wide as I want it. I know it’s somewhat of a pain to scroll around a page like that, but the filter function let’s me find notes that I want pretty quickly. Still more to figure out here, and if Tony’s willing, I’d like to be able to do a few more things…

By the way, if you want the New Note link, just start a page and press B; a box with the link will come up. Just drag the link to the toolbar and start saving.
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So my most recent Weblogs workshop for teachers here ended yesterday; four days over the last two weeks, 2.5 hours a day. It was a nice mix, and they have some good ideas brewing for integration into their classrooms. I’m pretty happy with the result.

But the best part of the workshop was the last 45 minutes where I picked their brains as to how they felt about blogs, about the workshop, and about the integration of technology in general. I whipped up a very unscientific survey which 16 of them returned that I think produced some interesting results. This first set was rated on a 1-10 scale with 10 being the best or highest:

Today we’re taking a look at Weblogs at the NJEDge Conference in Plainsboro, NJ…

UPDATE: Let me tell you, it’s getting tougher and tougher to do my Weblogs schtick in under an hour. But it’s still fun. Had about 20 higher ed types subjected to blogvangelism this morning, one of whom was learning portfolio blogger extraordinaire Helen Barrett who was gracious enough to sit in on my spiel. I always enjoy meeting bloggers in person.

For the attendees: As promised, here is the presentation, and I’ve added a page at the end with some pertinent links. Let me know if you need anything else.

Having just said that I’m having trouble finding “best practices,” the AP College English class Weblog at Oak Park & River Forest High School outside of Chicago looks like it’s got some potential. And the teacher, Bernie Heidkamp, has set up Weblogs for his other two sections as well as his American Studies class. (They were blogging the debate last week.) There is some serious critical thinking and writing going on, as evidenced by this post in particular.

I think this is a very easy yet effective way of getting into this. And the teacher(s) has obviously thought it through as evidenced by this “Your Blogging Responsibilities” page. And just why are they using blogs?

1. It allows us to continue conversations we have begun in class and explore issues often with more depth and thoughtfulness – since we will force ourselves to articulate our ideas in writing.

2. It allows us to discuss issues that we have not addressed in class (because of time limits or the particular focus of the units) but that someone thinks is relevant to our study of American culture (in the case of American Studies and American Literature classes) or literature and culture in general (in the case of other classes). It gives you, the students, more control of what we talk about.

3. Since our weblog will be public (people will be able to find it through Google and other search engines and other bloggers and websites can and will link to us), everyone in class will have a public voice and immediately be published writers. This “publicity” offers a wonderful opportunity to have an audience for your ideas and an important responsibility to present ideas that you truly believe in while writing in a mature, confident style.

Ok…I’m feeling better now…
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So I had about 90 minutes of true blogging flow this morning, reading the latest in my Bloglines aggregator, clicking on links, Furling interesting posts, and stealing paragraphs here and there and saving them as a Webnote. When I was in the midst of it, it all seemed to connect, the tools working seamlessly together, each with its distinct purpose. I really did get lost in it, which is either a moment of higher understanding of all of this or a sad comment on my geeky existence. There was so much good stuff to read, so much that I wanted to write about and explore further. So much mental exercise at 6:30 in the morning as the sun came up over the soccer field outside my window. It was very Zen.

Now, however, it’s very overwhelming. I’ve got this growing mountain of ideas and snippets of some very smart people, and I’m wondering what to do with it. Why, exactly, am I Furling, Webnoting, blogging my time away? Now that I am able to capture all of this information, what exactly do I do with it?

And another thing…

At yesterday’s workshop, only three of the 20 teachers had even heard of a Weblog when we started. I was pretty amazed. That’s not a slap a the teachers who were there; it’s just that the difference between my online educator blogging world and the reality of the classroom teacher world is becoming more and more acute. Online, things seem to be going in all sorts of directions. In the classroom, well…it’s just a different story. Try as I might, I still have yet to find more than a couple of dozen K-12 teachers who are using Weblogs in ways that can potentially enhance their students’ learning. It just feels like a big disconnect, somehow.

One of the gems that I found this morning was from Darren Cannell who has a pretty interesting post titled “Are we entering a dark age of information?” In it, he paints a picture of the potential changes that these technologies are creating and the lack of recognition by schools.

Too much information.
Students who understand how to navigate the web.
Teachers who do not.
Students who have no one to show them what is good and what is bad.
A system of education in which students and teachers do not connect.

I’m wondering to what extent students are passing their teachers in their ability to manipulate the Internet and information, and to what extent teachers will be willing to learn how to model the skills that students are going to need to manage all of this in effective ways. If I’m struggling, I can’t imagine what it must be like for teachers who are just seeing the landscape for the first time.
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I’m here in beautiful Washington, NJ doing an in-service workshop for Warren County educators on the wonders of Weblogs. By the end of the session, we’ll hopefully have 20 or so more educator bloggers in the mix.