Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I love my Year 11 English class! At the moment we are analysing the persuasive language devices used in newspaper articles, specifically letters to the editor, editorials and opinion columns. An article we looked at by Michael Read in The Age “

My…

I always like seeing how others present about weblogs so I thought I’d
share my presentation  given at the ‘High Schools That Work”
conference from a few weeks back. I left off screen shots of various
educational weblogs, Bloglines, Blogger, TypePad and Furl. I had no
Internet connections so I had to make do with screen shots. The
audience seemed to like the overview. Since the PowerPoint was quite
large I’ll just show the main focus, my jot notes for what I planned to say, and how I used pictures to get the
ideas across.

	This month’s issue of The American School Board Journal discusses the web and its effect on education. From online learning to school blogs, the Internet is revolutionizing education. Craig Colgan, the author of an article, “What’s in a Blog?” tells the story of how educators are discovering the newest form of intimate and immediate conversation. One of the captions in the article is “An Unrealized Potential”. That’s my focus today.
	What is a weblog? I could give you all the traditional definitions like….  a blog is the shortened form for weblog a blog is a way to publish a website quickly and easily You don’t have to have a program like Dreamweaver or Front Page. You can publish your website anywhere, from any browser, any computer. You can do all this for free or a minimal cost. and the best thing is it makes it possible for ALL educators to have a web presence that is quick and easy to manage for those with little or no extra time. SO all  the above tells you the features a weblog has but…… instead I want to focus on the ways weblogs are unique and then how you might consider using them in your high schools..
	It’s all about possibilities.,,,,,,,,, The best thing about weblogs is that they can be anything you want them to be. There is not really a right or a wrong way to use weblogs. You can use them….. to discuss books, share your thoughts and ideas with other educators provide information on topics like science or any content area, Presidents, hobbkes portfolio record of work on what they are learning provide updated information for libraries, non-profit organizations, news be a source of information for your parents team/departement communication tool way to keep a record of a project place to list homework link to items related to your subject areaecognize students sports page, extracurricular activities PR space to to recognize students practice skills learned in a fun way Mention my preference …… make writing the focus!
	I have to mention this first because I think you all have seen how weblogs in general are changing our landscape - politics, news, teens, If we enter these conversations and make education the focus we can be change agents for helping make education relevant to our students. Voice also includes the students. We have much to learn from them. In my three years of using weblogs with students I have been amazed at what I have learned, especially from the student voices. They need to be in this mix and we need to value and respect those voices. Not only can we get OUR voice heard by the public and each other, weblogs present a wonderful opportunity to get the voices of the public on our side. (as educators presenting legitimate concerns and issues) We can learn from all the different voices.
	Choice  of what you write, what you link to Gives you some control Same with students Weblogs make students feel like they have some control over their work, a choice. Every time I talked about blogs with students, it came through loud and clear that they liked having a choice about what they wrote. Now this didn’t mean that they could just write about anything they pleased, but they had a choice within some parameters. So try to build that in within the parameters of what you are trying to achieve. Weblogs give students ownership.
	Having an audience is perhaps one of the most interesting features of weblogs. Weblogs have a comments feature where anyone can respond to what you or your students have written. Absolutely the first thing they check. We feel the anticipation and excitement just like they do when we receive comments. Might need to orchestrate this in the beginning. Tell about Sunday School, senior citizens, school board members, Philip fromParis.(jvolunteers who would comment) Then tell about author.who wrote (through comments) to the students.
	Weblogs give me a chance to build learning communities where I am on the same footing as my students. We write together. We talk about how it is hard work. We share things that work. We learn to disagree in agreeable ways. I really like that and so do the students.  Learning communities develop within your field - ed tech, social studies teachers, math teachers and others. You need to give it time. I’ve learned more about teaching, about my students and what they are thinking and learning, about the use of technology for learning and , oh so many other subjects from blogging than anything else I’ve done. It really is the best inservice!
	Weblogs disrupt the notion that the best way to deliver curriculum is the same way we’ve been doing it forever and ever. I think that is a good thing and if we have enough voices banding together with a common purpose perhaps, just perhaps our voices will be heard. You need to join the community.
	Now, look at this picture. Can’t you see the potential there?
	Now we want to make sure that that potential is developed to the fullest from that age all the way up through elementary, middle, high, and most important, even  further.  We want to sent them out into the world as life-long learners. I’m here today to tell you about a tool that has the potential to transform our curriculum and have not only our students but ourselves learning way beyond the ringing of the classroom bell. And I have to tell you that it is indeed empowering. Exploring possibilities for the use of weblogs in education is stimulating and engaging. Weblogs are unique spaces on the web. They are places where you or your students can write and publish about a topic or several topics. Unlike traditional websites, they offer instant publishing that can be done anywhere, anytime, and from any browser. Not only is it a quick process but it can be accomplished with minimal or even no cost. Weblogs have built in features that enable further discussion and interaction from a much wider audience than our classrooms.
	We have a wave of knowledge that is available to us now through the Internet. This wave of information requires us to rethink what it means to be literate. We have always defined it based on the 3 R’s.”Reading, “riting” ,Rrithmetic”. Of course those are still of paramount importance but  our continued future success is based on our ability to review our educational practices, affirm our accomplishment, modify the practices that are ineffective and seek educational innovations that emerge as best practices, especially in technology. So to continue my story……
	I have a story to share with you about the potential of using weblogs in your classroom. When I finish, I hope you will see the possibilities that weblogs can offer to help you turn your classrooms into “High Schools that work!”
	My story begins with the neglected “R”. (why I got into weblogs) American education will never realize its potential as an engine of opportunity and economic growth until a writing revolution puts language and communication in their proper place in the classroom. Writing is how students connect the dots in their knowledge. Although many models of effective ways to teach writing exist, both the teaching and practice of writing are increasingly shortchanged throughout the school and college years. Writing, always time-consuming for student and teacher, is today hard-pressed in the American classroom. Of the three ‘Rs,” writing is clearly the most neglected.” Writing needs to be put squarely in the center of the school agenda, and most importantly in your very own class agenda. Writing is not simply a way for your students to demonstrate what they know but it is a way to help them understand what they know. At its best, writing is learning. So my story continues with a story of taking facts, details and information and showing students how to use it in blogging as an act of discovery, a powerful way to see real meaning for writing.

Here’s a link to additional handouts I provided at the conference.

Maybe it’s been mentioned here before, but it’s news to me: The people behind the Writing Centers Research Project are making the full-text archives of The Writing Center Journal available to the public. Nice!

Wesley Fryer (a Texas educator you should keep your eyes on) wrote a powerful blog entry several days ago. He is Advocating for Educational Deregulation!. Fryer discusses the primary text of his current (and final) course in his doctoral program. The text is Integrating Multiple Literacies in K-8 Classrooms, and he addresses […]

Every educator knows how time-consuming even the simplest classroom management tasks can be. Every minute spent on block-printing desktop name tags, composing welcome letters, writing behavior reports, sketching state flag bingo cards, drawing Venn diagra

TechLearning provides an online searchable database of grants and contests of interest to those in educational technology. There are two ways to find a grant, contest, funding opportunity or recognition program for which you or your students might qualif

This week I went to a Tom Hoerr workshop on Multiple Intelligences in the classroom. He has been the principal of a

primary school

in the US, which uses

Howard Gardner’s

idea that intelligence is not unitary, that it is multiple. This is tr…

From Ed.gov Extra Credit Article
By Ray Simon [Deputy Secretary, US Department of Education]
“Gauge Dropouts By Computers, Not Slide Rules”

How can a nation that invented the light bulb, created vaccines to eradicate polio, put a man on the moon and conceived the Internet not have a good handle on how many of its students drop out […]

The search is on for the nation’s top education visionaries. Not long after Intel Corporation staged its own Visionary Conference in Washington, D.C., two more technology giants are on the hunt. Dell Inc., the nation’s leading provider of computers to sch

Touted as the successor to AppleWorks, iWork contains both a template-driven word processing program called Pages, and an upgraded version of Keynote, Apple’s presentation program. Is this sleek and snazzy overhaul worth a look by K-12 educators? To find

Graham Glass, whom eWeek describes as the “founder of successful software companies, supporter of Web services and service-oriented architectures, and former chief technology officer at webMethods Inc.,” has left that company to start a new venture he describes in his blog thusly: So after many years of working on enterprise software, I’ve decided to get back to my training roots…

This makes me downright giddy:

2015
The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.

Now I know I have no life, but this is what it’s all about. This is where my sometimes nutty brain feels things are headed as well. Think of what this means for teachers and schools. And, before we miss it, let’s really think about this moment and what we are a part of.

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don’t.

I do…every day. I know I am really out there with this, but I still get butterflies when I read and think and participate with this new Web. It’s the power of ideas and conversations and contribution. And it’s very cool.

Alan says that he’s moved from Furl to del.icio.us and I guess that means I’m going to have to snag his new RSS feed (though it’s kicking out an error right now.) But the ironic thing is I’ve been moving away from Furl as well, but to Jots instead, not del.icio.us. Still not sure exactly why, and in all honestly, Jots does not seem to be gaining a lot of tracking if the slow increase in URLs linked is any indication. But there is something about the look of the page that just appeals to me, and something about del.icio.us’s that I bump up against. I’ve been thinking of adding the RSS to my Jots account as a link blog feed, and, actually, I just went ahead and did it. (Thanks to Alan’s Feed2JS.)

I think at some point, you just kind of latch on to what “feels” right, sometimes at the expense of a larger community. Alan is definitely tapping into the bigger database, but then again, I’ve never gone too far down the social road of these tools anyway, save the subscribe to someone else’s feed or search feed path. And maybe that’s enough. But I do know there is a whole day’s worth of thinking and writing I need to do regarding the folksonomy stuff that’s been bubbling up lately. Organization has never been my strength…