So this is cool…one of the health and physical edcuation teachers here at my school got a “Best Practice” award from PE Central for his class Weblog. He’s been doing some pretty good thinking with his students at the site, and I think it’s great that he’s getting some outside recognition for it.

Go Blogs. Go!
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So I got up early and did some site sprucing, namely updating the Practices page that I have been totally neglecting. That’s because I hadn’t added my Furl feed for the classroom or school sites that I have been finding lately. Now that I have, there are 94 links on the page, and it will be automatically updated as I Furl along.

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It’s been a long week. Way too much thinking. I’m tired. So instead of holding forth on some convoluted idea in my brain, here instead is a list of some edu-blogs I’ve Furled of late.

Chico Christian Middle School
AuburnWiki
Apple Students Blog
Simmons College Student Blogs
The Future of Mathematics which today has some ideas about Flickr in the classroom.
Networked Rhetorics from Syracuse U.
English 120 from Iona College.
Spartan Weblog from Durham, NC.
Ohio State Website Redesign Blog
Kew Forest (NY) Spanish
Wilson High School

Go Blogs (and wikis), Go!

Aaron Campbell, Barbara Dieu and Graham Stanley are putting on a six-week online workshop titled “Using Weblogs in ESL/EFL Classes:
New Developments, Uses, and Challenges”. Anne and I will be leading chats at points, mine on RSS in the classroom. There are over 150 participants from all over the world, and I’m really interested to see how it’s all going to work. The leaders have done an amazing job of organizing it, and I’m happy to have been asked to be a part of it because I’m once again learning about a lot of online collaboration sites like TappedIn, Alado, and Learning Times that I haven’t really used before.

One note about the Yahoo group where the participants are meeting before the class begins. I haven’t used a newsgroup like that in quite a while, and now I remember why. There are over 275 messages coming fast and furious. And even though there is an RSS feed for the group, only the first two lines get aggregated, so it’s pretty much useless. (Is there a way to change Yahoo feeds that maybe I don’t know about?) Actually, now that I think about it, maybe it’s not the group but the feed I’m having trouble dealing with.

At any rate, should be a great experience…

So this is the potential of the Read/Write Web in the hands of creative educators:

This project is based around stories. The idea quite simply is to let young people tell each other stories and by doing so share experiences, analyse and create a new sort of learning. Using old and new technologies the project will bring young people from around the world together into a virtual learning space where they can share, talk and learn.

In its pilot phase, young people from the Anglo European School (AES), and contemporaries from a school or educational establishment in ‘The Third World’ will create a website and a magazine focused around issues of global citizenship.
The site will be designed to enable young people to create new pages and links without any knowledge of computer programming or design. The site will also enable participants to add content direct from their mobile phone. Running alongside the site will be a high-quality print magazine offering content in attractive, easily accessible and portable formats.

The project is deeply rooted in the existing work of the school, the children and the management. It is also deeply rooted in the world of the young people. It begins with their world, it uses their language and exploits their technologies. Using networks and tried-and-trusted ink and paper media the project will allow young people to tell their own stories, listen to others and, under the auspices and through the curriculum of the Anglo European School, build a real learning experience. (Emphasis mine.)

This from Paul Caplan from London who is building this project for his Masters in Education for Sustainability. (Where do I sign up?) He plans on using Weblogs, wikis, cell phones and more to make this work, and he’s looking for either ideas or collaborators. Drop a comment if you’re interested.

The best part is, it’s not that hard. If you don’t believe that, check out the blogversation that George Mayo and Jane Levy are having about getting started.

Just wanted you to know that my whole class listened to your podcast. They loved it and they also read some of the magazine. They’re motivated to give it a go. Please let your students know that they have given my class a lot of ideas of what we can do with our class blog. Send them my thanks and complliments!

Have I mentioned lately how much fun this is???
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I’ve gotten two e-mails in the last two days from educators who are doing what I think are great things in the classroom with blogs. (I love it when that happens…)

At Warren Consolidated Schools in Michigan, they used Weblogs to connect students from 20 different schools to collaborate in an “Authors in Autumn” project where they created an interactive story:

The interactive story is designed to allow students to add paragraphs to the main story in “Real-Time”. As soon as they type out their part of the story and click submit, their portion of the story is instantly added to the main story. Participating Media Specialists will help coordinate and facilitate the use of the technology as students work to create a truly unique story with many twists and turns. We hope you are as excited as we are to see how the story develops. This is truly an exciting and fun activity for the students which promotes collaboration among staff, students, and schools.

Chris Kenniburg writes that the blog had an effect:

With instant results and the participation of many schools in the district, students were eager to learn about story writing techniques. This new use of technology was exciting and easy for the students and adds a new twist to how blog technology can be used by teachers in a learning environment.

They are going to follow it up with a live distance learning event between a number of schools and the authors. The links to the stories are slow, but they do show up eventually

The second example is from Bill Deneen at Mt. Holyoke College. Get this:

We have a group of students and a professor going on a tall ship, the HMS Bounty, for a 2-week course in sailing and seamanship. As part of the course, students will write about their experiences as they happen, posting to a blog via satellite phone. It’s a meeting of 19th century transportation and 21st century communications, all in the name of education.

Ok, first of all, where do I sign up? Second of all, is that cool or what? Connecting, collaborating, communicating, constructing…lots of learning on the high C’s. I know, bad joke. But stuff like this really makes it clear that we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface…
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Hopefully, we’ll be seeing more and more of this:

I have to hand it to all of you, you’ve done an amazing job with keeping things fresh and real at the Class Blog this semester. If you remember, I started the semester with a plea to participate and a flat out declaration, that “this is a grand experiment.” Well, for my money, this has been a great success!

Cole Campalese at Penn State used a Weblog with his Information Sciences and Technology class this fall to discuss issues related to class. The part I really like is that he hopes to add to the blog in upcoming semesters, making it a course text. It’s good stuff. Take a look, for instance, at this thread about computers that can make themselves smarter.

I know it’s obvious, but I just want to point out that the instructor’s investment in this blog is probably what made it a success in large measure. Teaching with a Weblog takes work, but it’s work that I think, and it seems others think is well worth it.
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Looks like this is becoming a regular feature every couple of weeks. (Maybe I should do a podcast???)

I was glad to see Pat Delaney writing about his blogging work once again. He’s a major voice in the K-12 blogging world that has been pretty silent lately. But he’s obviously still been working hard to bring Weblogs to the masses. Here are some links to school blogs he’s been supporting/following:

Galileo Web–The starting point for exporation of Pat’s school site. I’ve highlighted a couple below, but spend some time clicking through the “Tech Integration Links” in the left column. Really well done stuff.

Developing Writers–This is a great example at Pat’s school of how to use a Weblog to provide articulation materials for teachers. I wish my school would jump on this idea more, have Expository Composition teachers, for example, create a site that provides instructional materials, rubrics and models for the different essay genres they teach.

Ms. Chiang–Teaching Chinese with a blog. Nice example of class portal and materials/homework archive. More examples here.

The National Writing Project Blog Project also lists some educational uses of Weblogs on various levels. (See the “Tour of WP Blogs” in the left column.) Some highlights:

The Sequoia Sentinel–The homepage for the Sequoia School site.

IHMS 103–A beautiful middle school site with lots of student writing and feedback. We use this model at our school as well.

Hidden Histories– A collaborative blog between two sixth grade classrooms 300 miles apart.

East Side Bloggers–High school bloggers in every grade. Try the “sort by students” drop down to get the scope of what they’re doing.

And some others that I’ve run across of late:

Kearney, Nebraska–A bunch of school and classroom sites using Manila.

My Blogging Experiment–Where China, ESL Teaching & Technology come together…

Kew Forest Teacher’s Blog–Library and Technology resources for teachers.

The Future of Mathematics–James Tubbs in Middletown, OH is blogging his “Thoughts, observations, and lessons about innovative uses of technology in the mathematics classroom.”

Very cool to watch as more and more teachers start using the tool…
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Don’t exactly know why, but all of a sudden there seems to be a bunch
o’ teachers and students blogging that I hadn’t seen before. I’m lovin’it! Here’s some more examples of how classrooms are putting the technology to good use:

I love it when people start using classroom Weblogs after getting some “blogvangelism.” Here’s a local school that set up a collaborative Weblog between students and Tony Abbot, the author of The Secrets of Doom series. The kids asked questions which he answered on the blog. I especially liked the 144 thank you comments after the author make an in person visit to the school.

Now they want to do another collaboration with Herman Parish, the author of the Amelia Bedelia series. (My kids love those books.) Can’t wait to see it.
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George Mayo is a first year English teacher in Virginia Beach, Va. who has his sixth graders blogging in the “M & M Online Magazine.” It’s basically a series of 15 individual student blogs connected by a magazine homepage. It’s just coming together, but the best part of it is that his kids are obviously blogging about their passions: fashion, the NFL, skateboarding, video games, etc. And, they’re obviously not just writing for themselves:

Good evening every one this is Jean-Herbert R. writing. Today I will be writing about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. In this video game you could be Harry, Hermonie, and Ron. The main idea of this game is that you have to fight the evil Dementors and you have another promblems…

In an e-mail, George writes:

Its been a great experience so far. I’m amazed at the care that most of the students are taking with their writing. Its also amazing to watch them spontaneously peer edit each other’s work.

It CAN be pretty amazing when kids are allowed to practice writing with topics that they are really interested in. Throw in a pinch of an audience, and this is a formula that would seem to be pretty conducive to enhancing a student’s ability to write.
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I’m prepping for a two-day workshop on the read/write web for Ed. D. candidates at Seton Hall this weekend and I’ve found a few pretty interesting education related Weblog sites to add to the list.

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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Bernie Dodge just finished a workshop with K-12 teachers called “Motivating Student Writing with Weblogs” and from the looks of it, there are a few new edubloggers to add to the list. There are also a wealth of resources that you can dig out of the class and participant blogs:

(via Michael Feldstein) Well, maybe not quite 745, but I am finding more and more of these out there. And this one by Cole Campalese (and others) at Penn State plays it pretty close to the Barbara Ganley model of teacher engagement. I don’t think the homepage will eventually be taken over by his students, but I do like the way he uses his posts to synthesize the discussion from earlier posts, frame the discussion for that particular post, and link/quote relevant content from other sites. This is a teacher modeling what he wants from his students. And, he offers up a rubric to assess their posts as well. Note that the instuctors do some commenting on the commenting too, prodding…encouraging…pointing.

Teachers who use blogs need to blog. They need to model it and show how the critical reading, thinking and writing skills that real blogging demands can push their own thinking and their own learning. Blogging isn’t just a tool to enhance student learning, you know…
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