So I’ve been bumming since the Blogger Beta went live and the old hack that would get rid of that potentially dangerous (at least for classroom teachers) “Next Blog” button from your blog stopped working. But yesterday in one of my presentations here at NCCE, Glenn Malone offered up a solution. Problem is, I can’t get it to work on my MAC, but I think it might be user error on my part.

Here is the work around that Glenn offered (and Glenn, if you read this, please follow up in the comments if I get any of it wrong.)

1. Go to the Gecko&Fly site that has some new Blogger Beta Templates and choose one you like.
2. Click on the link to visit the template page.
3. Download the template code.
4. Unzip the file and open up the code in a text editor and copy it. (Here’s where I get stuck and need help from MAC users…see below.)
5. Open up your current template in Blogger, select all and paste the new template code over it. Save it.

Here’s my problem…I can’t seem to open the code for some reason. With some of the templates, when I unzip the file and click on what extracts, it tries to open it in some game application. Strange. And when I do get a file that will open in the text editor, it’s not xml…it looks like a web page. So I’ve never been able to get to step 5. Any ideas?

UPDATE: Thanks to Dan Meyer who e-mailed with the final step. Just paste the following into the CSS of the template.

Technorati Tags: ncce2007, blogger, blogging

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about blogging as an act, my love of it, my frustration with it, my history with it. In that spirit, today my brain wandered a bit, trying to reconstruct how exactly I came to blogging, what my first post was, and what the impetus was behind this amazing relationship I’ve had with it. I’d thrown some time at this before, searching through my Blogger archives, the Wayback machine, trying to find the very first words I blogged, but with no success. But today, I had one of those “doh” moments, realized it had been there right in front of my face all along, and finally found it.

So, just so I get the chronology down, I hope you’ll indulge me in a little personal blogging history. (Or not, of course…) Piecing it together now, I find hugely interesting the process I worked through in my own practice with all of this.

So, yeah, June 11, 2001 it starts. Taken out of context, those first words give this whole story a more romantic (if it could be that) feel than it deserves. It turns out the first blog I created was in the “Nerdy Books Journal” which I started during the year I took off from school to help Wendy launch her books. I kept work notes and links as we tried to market and make connections. As it turned out, when I went back to school that fall, the blog pretty much died.

Exactly a month later I started the School Stuff blog which was basically just a personal link/notes blog that I kept up for about six months. Then, on October 23, 2001, I started my first class blog for my Beginning Journalism kids:

Welcome to the journalism blog!

I’ve set this up as a place where you can come if you need to find information about class, about journalism, and about the world. I’ll be posting homework information here regularly; you can find it at the top of the left hand column. I’ll also be posting links, and from time to time I might just throw out some of my own feelings about stuff that’s going on.

You can post here too if you like. Just let me know if you would like to get access. Your names will get posted with each entry, and I have administrative control over content. It would be another way you could contribute to our understanding of journalism and to show effort on your part. Let me know if you want to give it a try.

I’ll be updating this a lot in the next few days, and you guys are going to be my guinea pigs for some other stuff over the next couple of weeks. I know you’re happy. Bear with me, okay?
If you want to set up your own Blog, (I love Blogs!) I’ll be happy to help.

I love how tentative that sounds now, looking back. In all honesty, it makes me nostalgic as all get out, that experimentation phase, not knowing exactly what I was doing or where it was going to go. It’s what I miss most about being in the classroom, without question.

On November 13 of 2001, I started a class portal blog for my Web Pages and Portfolios class.

Please bookmark this spot as it will be the place where you can check for updates on assignments, links to cool sites and information about page creation and design, and links to your own personal weblogs.

Scanning the posts, I remembered that I had them set up their own blogs at Diaryland (which, I’m amazed to say, is still in existence.) They were the first of my students to have blogs.

About a month later, my first really personal blog was born, and I do mean personal. In fact, I’d forgotten just how personal some of the posts were at the very beginning. That was back in the day when I never thought anyone was going to be reading anything I wrote anyway, so I figured baring my soul was perfectly ok. (Um, no, not linking to that one.) After I got my first couple of comments, I changed course pretty quickly. That site did eventually turn into Weblogg-ed about a year later.

Then, on January 25, 2002, I started yet another blog, this one for my Journalism 2 students aimed more toward discussion and actually getting kids involved in a learning community online:

Welcome to the Journalism 2 Weblog where we will carry on a conversation about this class and about journalism as a whole. I’m expecting you to get in here and add to the conversation twice a week. That means an average (read: “C” for you grade grubbers) effort on your part would be around 15-20 meaningful posts over the next nine weeks. The more the better. (Remember the word meaningful,however.) A weekly topic will be posted in the left-hand column to get you started, but if you want the big bonus points, post here on your own. Find interesting articles or links that you think the class would be interested in and add them with a bit of comment or question. For a good example of what I’m talking about, see Metafilter. Debate is encouraged, but remember, be civil. I’ll try to enter the conversation too. So have fun with this and use it as a way to push your learning about journalism, the news, and the world around you.

Oooo…the grade thing hurts! But, I have to tell you, reading through some of those early posts from my kids, I can understand why this whole blogging thing bit me so hard. I mean seriously, read those very first three posts and you’ll see what I mean. And as I quickly scanned through some of the 1,057 posts that we accumulated on that blog in those nine weeks (which is amazing in itself) I am floored by the amount of thinking and linking those kids were doing. That was a very uncertain and scary time (as if today isn’t…) and it’s neat to read the kids working through it.

And that was it…I was hooked. I started blogs for my yearbook kids, my softball team, and the next fall I cajoled the technology guys to install Manila on one of our servers. That September we did the Bees, and my classes went paperless. They’re still serving up over 500 sites at my old school…pretty cool.

(Note: Just in case you got this far, I ended up having to re-templatize most of those old blogs today since they were all pointing at old servers which were long gone. Thank goodness Blogger let me push them back over to Blogspot…)

(Photo “Brace for Impact” by Big-E-Mr-G)

Technorati Tags: blogging, education, learning

I’m a geek, I know. But I just loved this post on “blogging restructures consciousness?” by Ben Vershbow at if:book. I mean really, really loved it for a lot of geeky reasons, not the least of which is that it models everything I love about blogging. It’s a topic that I have a deep affinity for and probably would never connect to in physical space or through traditional publishing. It’s a topic that resonates with my own search…does blogging literally change who we are? It’s a post that synthesizes a lot of different ideas from disparate sources, all linked of course. And it’s a post that challenges my brain; these ideas are just out of my reach without doing some mental stretching. Ben’s obviously crafted this essay with a great deal of thought from a bloggers’ perspective.

And in terms of the ideas, mull on this a bit:

The kind of communication that he and his fellow rhetoricians have been orchestrating in recent years in the blogosphere — not to mention parallel developments elsewhere with wikis, message boards, social media, games and other inchoate forms that feel as much like public spaces as documents — has a speed and plasticity that approaches oral communication. A blog post isn’t so much a finished opus as a lump of clay that readers and other bloggers collectively shape through comments and discussion. Are these new technologies of the word (and beyond the word) restructuring consciousness?

And this thought provoking description from the blog that spurred Ben’s post:

After two and a half years of virtually non-stop blogging, my perception of myself as a distinct individual has dramatically waned. My interior monologue has virtually disappeared. I no longer have aesthetic-based epiphanies, and I almost never concern myself with examining internal passions or emotions anymore. Blogging has not just changed the activities in which I engage–the activities in which I engage in order to be a successful blogger have profoundly altered the way my mind operates and the way I conceptualize my agency in relation to others. In effect, I do not exist in the same way I once existed.

Whoa. Now I know this is a guy who blogs 65-hours a week…extreme blogging, anyone? Even so, as I read the rest of that post, I wonder how my own 10-20 hours a week of blogging and writing (if not more) have transformed my own existence…

Technorati Tags: blogging, writing

I’ve been playing around with Google Reader and just noticed an interesting thread between the first two posts that I shared to my public page. First, David Weinberger:

I came away realizing why media literacy programs often bother me. Frequently, the idea even is that we have to teach our children how to recognize the Internet sites that are as reliable and safe as what they’ll find in a library. That’s a useful skill, but the overall picture is wrong. If you want to know what’s going on in a field, the static and credentialed sources generally aren’t where you want to go. The credentialed sources are great for certain types of information—the solid and stolid facts, the commoditized information, the boring truth—but the real intellectual action is usually occurring in the blogs, newsletters, and forums. Confining students to the credentialed sites is likely to kill their interest and enthusiasm. [Emphasis mine.]

And then, from Alex Reid:

In any case, I will say this about research and blogging. When I read scholarship I encounter ideas that I find interesting and thought-provoking. However, if I were going to think about what I teach in my courses, much of the valuable information I rely on comes from blogs, and not only from academic blogs. If I want to know what teachers in new media were doing a year ago, I guess I could read a journal. If I want to know what people are doing now, what new developments are emerging, what is working and what isn’t, I would look at blogs. Wouldn’t you? [Emphasis mine.]

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see this conversation develop more fully on the K-12 level as well? What if we stopped blocking blogs and implicitly telling students that they aren’t reliable and instead start making them a part of our daily classroom practice? What if, as Joyce Valenza’s matrix suggests, we start teaching our students to make good decisions about the content they encounter, to be effective editors? What if we modeled for them how to engage in the ideas instead of just consuming them?

technorati tags:reserach, blogging, education, learning, literacy

Well, that didn’t take long.

Now I know this is all totally unscientific and probably doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but here are the results from the survey I posted Monday with some brief thoughts. I’d love to know what you think. (By the way, I screwed up in terms of allowing people to choose an answer AND comment…seems it was one or the other not both. So some of these “results” don’t add up to 100%.)

Question 1: What percentage of educators in your country would you guess are using Read/Write Web tools in their professional orclassroom practice?

56% of respondents said less than 10% of educators were using the tools, and another 19% said it was less than 25% (Many of the 24% of people who left comments noted that it was less than 10% in their countries.)

Observation: We have a long, long way to go. And any real tipping point is still a ways off.

Question 2: What is the chief barrier to implementing Read/Write Web tools in the classroom?

• Lack of time: 17%
• Lack of PD: 20%
• Standardized Tests: 7%
• Safety/Privacy Concerns: 6%
• Technology Support: 10%
• Lack of leadership and vision on a local, state or national scale: 18%

Observation: It strikes me that the two things I seem to hear most about, namely testing and safety concerns, came in at the bottom of the heap.

Question 3: What group do you think most needs to understand the potentials that Read/Write Web tools have for learningin order to bring about their use in the classroom?

• Classroom Teachers: 50%
• Administrators: 32%
• Parents: 6%
• Community Members: 1%

Observation: Not a great question, I don’t think. A pretty obvious answer.

Question 4: Which of the following tools do you currently employ in your professional/classroom practice?

• Weblog: 92%
• Wiki: 71%
• RSS: 77%
• Flickr: 42%
• Social Bookmarking: 53%
• Skype: 36%
• Podcast 57%

Observation: Not really surprising…again.

Question 5: In general, how much of an effect do you think Read/Write Web tools will have on classroom practice 10 years from now?

• Look the same: 2%
• Classroom practice will look a bit different, but no fundamental change: 32%
• Fundamental change: 40%
• Transormation 19%

Observation: Actually, a bit more optimistic than I expected.

I posted all of the comments to a Google Doc page. Here are a couple I found interesting:

“As a College IT Director our students are beyond the tech/web2.0/Read&Write abilities of our faculty. We must adjust…or students will choose a ‘better’ school that provides these services and ‘talks’ to them with the tools they use.”
“I think the biggest problem at my school is that so many faculty members don’t know their way around a computer well enough to try 2.0 tools. They think I’m some sort of guru because I can connect a computer (set up monitor, plug in right sockets, etc.) and can do a bit with web pages. In fact, blogging and wikis are so far beyond them, it’s a little scary.”

“I am a Media Specialist, former Computer Applications teacher who could not use Read/Write tools due to filtering policies. The transfer was so that I could become more of a voice for change in the way we do business in the area of technology use…it is not the technology, it is what the technology allows students to do. This shift is ironically difficult to realize in an educational setting.”

Maybe more later…

technorati tags:blogging, education, learning, weblogg-ed

From the “15 Minutes of Fame” and the “It Feels Weird Actually Posting About This” Departments comes news that this month’s issue of Teacher Magazine is not only carrying a feature length story about yours truly but has for some insane reason actually decided to put my picture on the cover under the heading “The Blogvangelist.” (Free registration required.) I’m flattered, obviously, and somewhat embarrassed by the attention. (My kids, however, think it’s cool and actually took out the garbage this morning.) Regardless, the story does focus primarily on the work, and includes quotes from such luminaries as Alan November, Darren Kuropatwa, Anne Davis, Sree Sreenivasan, Chris Lehmann, and others.

But the best part, to me, however, is a sidebar that the writer Patrick McCloskey put together after interviewing my former student Meredith Fear and her Pulitzer Prize winning journalist/mentor Scott Higham who worked together in her blog in my class a few years ago. First of all, I didn’t realize that Scott actually gave her feedback in her blog while he was in Guantanamo Bay working on a story about a secret CIA detention facility.

Whoa!

And this quote literally warms my heart:

“For me,” Higham reflects, “the benefit was being able to plug into the mind of a very sharp teenager and connect on a professional level across generational lines. I witnessed the evolution of her thought processes and writing skills as she dealt with feedback. Blogs allow a teacher to literally take their kids out into the world from classrooms anywhere in America. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

That’s the type of affirmation we can all share with those we’re taking this message to…

technorati tags:education, learning, teaching, weblogg-ed

So here we have an example of a high school civics class blog by a student that is using the tool pretty well, I’d say. Especially just a few days into it. Once again, comments on Civics dude! are open, which has led to a pretty interesting exchange between student and unknown commentor. To guide you through it, here’s the original post, the comment, and the student’s response. I love this part from the student:

I think it’s so funny that someone I don’t even know who it is (Gayatri?) is posting comments on my schoolblog. I see how it can be very upsetting reading a highschool kid’s view on what America is doing. It is truly not my meaning to sound ever-knowing, or wise. Let’s face it, I’m seventeen and I don’t know 1% of what’s going on in the world. But I think that not understanding that I am a student trying to learn and expand my world, is pretty narrow-minded, as Gayatri said I was.

This is getting closer, I think, to what can happen…writing in response to reading for real audiences.

And by the way, Sanna’s teacher, I think, provides a great model for teachers to follow in terms of pointing to good blogging work by their students. This is how you start modeling the connections, by reading and linking. I snipped one such “mother blog” post below…click it to go read the comments.

technorati tags:education, blogging, learning20, weblogg-ed

I’ve feel fortunate and somewhat honored to have been asked to contribute to a new blog at the District Administration Magazine site called “The Pulse.” It’s an opportunity for me to reach a wider audience of administrators and to join in a conversation with some pretty respected thinkers about education in general, not just educational technology, folks like Alfie Kohn, whose books I have loved, Susan O’Hanian, and Etta Kralovec, to name a few. Also in the mix are David Thornburg, Roger Shank, and about a dozen others who I’m looking forward to engaging with and learning from. Hope you’ll stop by. I put up my first post today, not surprisingly about DOPA.

A bit of disclosure: I’m receiving no compensation for posting at The Pulse, and I have agreed to not write for competitors during my tenure there, so I won’t be posting at Ed Tech Insider any longer. This last bit took me some time to agree to, but I decided in the end that the opportunity to do some blogvangelizing more directly to administrators was worth the switch. And, in the interest of disclosing, I’ve added some information about my work to my About page. If there’s anything else you think I should be adding there, let me know.

Ok…that’s waaayyyy too much about me these last couple of days…back to our regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow.

technorati tags:The_Pulse, District_Administration, blogging, education

Tim Lauer posts today about Moving to Drupal to create a more complex and flexible blogging/learning management environment for teachers at his school. I have to admit that Drupal

is not something I know very much about other than it seems to be very customizable depending on your work flow requirements. (There are times I wish my brain had a better understanding of code and programming, and there are times I’m glad I don’t.) Tim writes:

I am really excited about using Drupal as a basis for web based student and teacher interaction. Drupal has a host of features that will allow us to have students and teachers use Drupal to manage the workflow of assignments and student response to assignments. For example each of our 4th and 5th grade teachers will have a blog which she will use to post assignments and announcements to students. Each 4th and 5th grade student will have a Drupal based blog that will live behind our firewall.

The student blogs in Drupal will be designed so that the left sidebar will host an aggregator that will pull in the last two assignments from each of the teachers and post them on the sidebar. (see graphic) When this feature is enabled in Drupal each of the aggregated posts also has a little button next to it which show up when a student is logged in. When the student clicks the button, the teacher assignment blog post is captured and quoted in a new student blog post. The student can then continue to write his or her post in response to the assignment.

Sounds like a pretty nice work environment for the students.

technorati tags:drupal, Tim_Lauer, blogging, education

So this looks pretty interesting…

Jenn has 60 students spread across 3 classes at Saint Rose college in Albany, New York. Jenn is going to have all of the students blog for class, it is a writing class, and I will leave the explanation at that. Jenn can say more about this and her goals for the class. What I am going to do is help Jen figure out how to get all the students set up, with minimal technical difficulties, and to help Jen figure out how to track all of the students postings.

There are a lot of details here which I will get into in future posts. But as an overview, I will be posting here on Academhack about the technical side. I am going to try outline step by step how this gets done. I will also hopefully create screencasts so that others can reproduce the efforts, borrow or change as they see fit. My goal is to create the tutorials on the level of web browser interface. This means if you are familiar with a web browser, can use Firefox, IE, Safari . . .than you should be able to follow the steps. Like I said, low entry barrier, open source.

The first post is already up.

Jenn’s class blog is called Expos-i-story, which I love, btw, and she’s already doing some interesting reflecting on her process and thinking. . It’s on a university level, but I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be instructive to K-12 teachers as well. Low entry and open source are filled with Web goodness…

technorati tags:education, blogging, college, expository_writing, teaching

Pat Aroune who is a high school teacher in upstate New York and a new edblogger (after 16 years in the business) sent along a link to some student Weblogs from his summer class on economics and a couple of them, Greg’s Public Views and Economics According to Andi struck me because of some of the work there and their reflections about blogging. Pat’s idea was to have them use their blogs to study economics in the context of whatever their passions were, and the results are pretty telling. Greg commented

I’ve learned in a way that tailors to my interests, what with using the internet to its fullest extent and writing about things that I am interested in. I would write about things like snowboarding, soccer, filmaking, eating, sleeping… whatever I wished, as long as I related it to economics. After doing this for a while, I started to realize that I was learning much faster than I would have normally by reading a boring (sorry, they almost always are) textbook. Not only could I write about things that I like and post them, but others could view those posts, as could I theirs, and consequently learn from their experiences and interests as well.

I think about this all the time in terms of my own children, who are learning to do all sorts of things in the context of what they are passionate about be it Power Rangers or horseback riding. And I’m really trying to nurture their entry into a world where they can learn together with other kids who are equally passionate about those topics (well, maybe not Power Rangers…)

Andi states it a bit differently but clearly makes the point:

To be quiet honest, I’ve become so accustomed to the “old skool” way of learning through the textbook and lectures, taking tests, and writing essays, that it’s just how I learn the easiest. It’s all I’ve known. How is this blogging thing gonna really help me? How am I even gonna know what to do? What does my teacher expect from me and how will I be able to meet those expectations? That was the main question right there. I’ve found that I learn in a way that requires a lot of structure. Someone tells me what to do and how they want it done, and like the mindless little nerd-monkey that I am, I do it. But by using this blog, I’ve been exposed to a new way of thinking and learning which has really been of benefit to myself. I’ve learned to think outside of the box and learn how I want to learn. You need to read her entire post about the experience…some very thoughtful and challenging reflections.

So here is a “new” bloggy teacher kicking the tires by allowing students to use blogs to write about things they are interested in and still draw it back in to the subject at hand. It’s not perfect…as the kids say, more commenting could have helped. But I really admire the initiative to change and experiment and reflect. And to make me think…

technorati tags:education, blogging, learning

Here’s the lead from a New York Post article today titled MySpace Invaders for City Students:

City public-school students better beware what they blog when classes resume in September.

A revised draft version of the city Department of Education discipline code calls for harsh punishments - including expulsion - forstudents who post “libelous or defamatory material or literature” on the Internet.

Kindergartners to fifth-graders who disparage their teachers, principals or fellow students on the Web could face a finger-wagging parent conference or be suspended for up to 90 days, according to theproposed discipline code.

For students in sixth grade through high school, derogatory online postings would warrant an automatic suspension and could necessitate expulsion under the new rules.

Nowhere in the article does it mention anything about teaching kids appropriate and acceptable use, which doesn’t mean that they’re not doing that, but it makes you wonder. And this approach is just doomed to failure. It’s a “deal with it” moment where the city is choosing to do just the opposite.

Now I know I don’t have to say this, but I’m going to anyway. Welcome to the new world. Resistance is futile. Education is the only answer.

technorati tags:blogging, NYC, education, fear

Yesterday, I exchanged a few e-mails with a former student of mine who just graduated college, and I was surprised and happy that he’d taken up blogging. He’s turned out to be a very good writer, and just the few minutes I spent reading his latest posts gave me this kind of weird pride-like feeling, like I may have had a little bit to do with some of that. Nice.

But the interesting thing is that he mentioned that he doesn’t see how blogs are much of an improvement over discussion boards. I’ve been reading and reflecting a lot on the conversation from a couple of days ago, and some of the outcomes from my workshop this week, and I have to say I think the difference is obvious: transparency. When I post to my blog, it not only has a chance to be read by a billion people, it also lives on in the Google-able and Technorati-able world of content. It also gets linked to by other people having other conversations. And it also creates a real sense of ownership of the ideas and the membership in the community.

That conversation about changing the culture was just powerful, I think. Twenty links and trackbacks to date, each one making me consider and reconsider my own position (except of course the one trackback in a foreign language…) Tom’s street metaphor made sense, and David’s Audioblog suggestion gave me ideas, and Alex’s reflection on his Cyberporn class added a great deal of context. And just about every comment seeded some more thinking.

And Kim! Holy cow! Kim started blogging at my workshop just four days ago and put up an amazing post about this topic.

Let me get this straight. I spent three days learning about wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, and various websites that I found totally intriguing and NEW. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been blown away by a new idea. Now I’ll admit, I usually don’t have time for those who will tell me why something won’t work. And there are plenty of people happy to see every change and new idea from that perspective. I’ve learned to at least listen to them, because they often help me to avoid some problems. But I’m not listening now. That’s right, I’m looking this whole fear issue, call it cautiousness if you like, and staring it down. Because that’s what it is when schools filter everything and avoid, it’s fear of the unknown, it’s ignorance, and it’s cowardice.

And that’s just the first paragraph. This is a high school principal speaking out, stepping out, the kind of voice this community might want to nurture and develop.

This is blogging at it’s best, I think, and what makes it so much more powerful than discussion groups. It’s network creation, connective reading and writing, conversation that anyone can engage with. I know I sound dreamy about it…so sue me. It’s what started me down this road over five years and over 2,500 posts ago. And it’s still the most powerful learning I do.

Technorati tags:Learning, Blogging, Weblogs, Education

So this “High School’s New Face” Conference has been really interesting and another example of how the people out here in Western New York are working hard to move schools and education in a different direction. There are about 150 educators here with each school bringing at team of teachers and a building principal or superintendent They have been split into four cohorts: Engaging the 21st Century Learner, Connecting the 21st Century Learner, Designing a School for the 21st Century Learner, and Leading the Way, the last for the administrators. The idea is that the different teachers from different districts take different strands and then will get back together after the conference to teach each other what they learned and hopefully have meaningful discussions about how to move forward.

I’ve been working with the Connecting group to learn about the tools, and I have to say that despite some connectivity issues, they have been absolutely great. We did two sessions yesterday (the last until 9 pm.) two more today, and will have one more in the morning…a total of almost 16 hours together! We’ve listened to students from local districts and from the Met School in Providence talk about what good teaching and learning is. (One of the students from the Met school read an incredible poem he had written basically about how the school had saved him from drugs and crime in his neighborhood…it was absolutely amazing.) We’ve teleconnected with an educator in Kansas, and tomorrow we’ll be hearing from the creators of Tech Valley High. It’s just been very well planned and delivered, and I’m just getting a really positive vibe about all of it.

The 50 or so members of my cohort are already producing some interesting content too. Kim Moritz who is a principal at a local high school, is asking some great questions about her curriculum. Beth McIntyre is already reading and thinking and writing about what she’s reading and thinking. And there are others who are just starting. We have our own Mother Blog and a cohort wiki as well. We’re getting there. As always, it will be interesting to see how much of it sticks, but if the conversations and ideas are any indication, much of it should.

technorati tags:blogging, education, Met_School, change, school_reform

Welcome to Ellicottville, NY where I have about 30 teachers and administrators in the room for the first session of what will be three days of immersion into blogs, wikis, podcasts, rss feeds, social bookmarking sites etc. AND pedagogy! (What a concept.)

So before we set up Blogger blogs, I give them my impassioned warning about how you have to be willing to talk (or blog) to the empty room, but that if you keep writing good stuff, people will find you. I draw the “Long Tail” on my tablet, give them strategies to find other bloggers, tell them how to comment on other posts and link back to their own. “Keep the faith!”

Then we make blogs. Five minutes. I tell them to read first, then write. To break intellectual sweat. To reflect, think, post. To…ah, whatever. Just post. But, of course be patient. Keep at it. The comments will come. Don’t…

When wouldn’t you know it. Like that moment in the big Bingo parlor when you call out “N-34″ and someone’s hand shoots up declaring victory, someone in the room says “Hey! I got a comment!” Six minutes after posting.

Six.

I run and put her blog up on the big screen. Even I am impressed. Six minutes. How did that happen, I ask? (Maybe I’ll tell them after dinner.)

I think we’re gettin’ it…

technorati tags:blogging, education