Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Seems I’m forever saddled with Bloglines backup these days, and it’s so frustrating not to have the time to read and think and write as much as I’d like to. And then when I do have the time, I read such interesting stuff that it’s hard not to take extra time to read and reread and dwell on the ideas. I’m starting to think that in my perfect blog world, I would have only about 20 kick butt feeds in my aggregator that I could just slowly chew through and breathe with, and then turn into some decent blogging. When I feel like my blogging sucks, like I have the past couple of weeks, it’s not about the writing. It’s about not having the time to read. I think that’s one of the most interesting things about this practice, by the way, one that not a lot of people really understand until they do it. Learning to me does not come very much from transcribling my life as it does capturing provocative ideas and deconstructing their meaning and relevance in my own practice. That’s where this becomes a lifelong learning addiction, in the connections between the reading and the writing.

The good news is that not everyone blogs like Barbara Ganley, ’cause if they did, I’d manage only five or six feeds max. Her latest post covers the ways in which she’s getting out her students’ way even more through blogs and podcasts and digital storytelling. She talks about teacher as DJ:

I believe wholeheartedly in having a huge stockpile of exercises and assignments in my pocket, and then ditching them all for something that evolves, that emerges from the learning community and the learning moment.

She talks about learning as a process, not an event:

So I am comfortable viewing the course as a living organism that will often take us places unanticipated at the beginning of the semester or even at the beginning of the class hour. This is an essential characteristic, I believe, of a successful blogging teacher.

And she writes about reinvention:

I have resisted setting up many guidelines for the stories–I want them to feel their way to their stories from this moment here in time. And right now, many of them are surely thinking that I have lost my mind–they look for the due dates; the detailed, clear instructions for success; and they really wonder why we aren’t just sticking to notebooks and keeping their creative writing, for the most part, private, between covers where for many of them it has lived since they were children, or slipped to the professor only when absolutely necessary…And we will blog–sharing the bumps, the pleasures, the questions, the discoveries. Already they feel self-conscious about posting, but that they are writing about that self-consciousness in their opening posts shows a willingness to speak honestly. Even i this opening week, the comments they leave one another illustrate already what the connectedness of social software can do for our students–they do not feel isolated in their learning, and if they feel a connection with others, well then, they will engage with the learning opportunities the group offers.

That is such good writing, and such good reading of the kind that makes me promise myself that in my own reinvention I will make time for my own process every day as an important part of my learning.

Each spring, school leaders and ed techies gather to pay a call on selected Technology Leadership Network member districts. These three-day meetings sponsored by NSBA provide an in-depth look at creative integration of technology in schools and lessons that leaders take back home to their districts. This year’s sites are Wake County Public Schools in North Carolina, on March 12-14; Metropolitan School District of Warren Township in Indiana, on April 24-26; and Orange City Schools in Ohio, on May 7-9. Details on how to sign up here.

Headed to NSBA’s annual conference in Chicago? If so, check out the executive briefing, “Future Vision: Helping Your Students Succeed in a Changing World,” at the Sheraton Chicago on Friday, April 7, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. before the conference starts. On Monday, April 10, there are two TLN site visits scheduled: Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Willow Bend School, Community Consolidated District 15 in Palatine, Ill., from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Students and teachers now have free online access to more than 100 historic films, including old World War II newsreels and NASA documentaries, thanks to an agreement between internet search giant Google Inc. and the Nat…

Last week NSBA filed its brief in an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case on special ed costs: Arlington Central School District v. Murphy. Press statement here.

The issue is whether a school district has to reimburse parents who win their special ed dispute with the district for the costs of expert witnesses, consultants, lay advocates, etc. IDEA requires the district to pay for the parent’s attorneys fees, but the statute is silent, and the lower courts split, on the others. The case arose in this district in New York. The Second Circuit court of appeals decided that courts should read into IDEA that Congress intended to cover such fees. Summary here.

NSBA and its fellow amici argued that this ruling is contrary to IDEA’s focus on collaboration. In the words of NSBA General Counsel Francisco Negrón, upholding the Second Circuit “will simply perpetuate a cycle of costly litigation by encouraging parents to hire experts. Public schools in turn will have little choice but to hire their own experts to rebut experts hired by parents.” In fact, Congress has “leveled the playing field” on this question by requiring school districts to pay for a parent who disagrees with the district to obtain a timely evaluation from an independent expert.

Joining NSBA on the brief were American Association of School Administrators, the New York State School Boards Association, and the New York State Council of School Superintendents. NSBA Council of School Attorneys members Darcy Kriha, Julie Heuberger Yura, and Patricia Whitten of Franczek Sullivan in Chicago were lead authors. Also noteworthy: The Bush administration is siding with the school district.

This blog by Chicago special ed parent lawyer Charles Fox highlights some of the arguments on other side. “Time For The Court To Show Us the Money!” it says, arguing that parents need their own experts to match the “firepower” of the schools. In this case, firepower refers to special education professionals whom, NSBA’s brief notes, the district employs “not to have an unfair advantage at due process hearings” but to serve children appropriately.

As BoardBuzz observed when the Supremes handed down its sensible ruling a few months ago in Schaffer v. Weast, it’ll be worth watching how the news media report this one. As we said then, the press coverage often falls into the tired temptation to portray these disputes as us-vs.-them, parents-vs.-bureaucrats battles; this tendency is the whole issue in this case. On another point educators and parent advocates can agree: No story is complete if it omits the chronic under-funding of special education that underlies so many of these disputes.

Against my wife’s better judgment, I’m at school today despite spending most of Sunday on the couch dealing with a flu-like fatigue. There was too much to take care of today in class today, so I took some Vicks Dayquil and am powering through this morning.
Not wanting to dwell on my personal health, I though […]

I really don’t have a problem with the Virginia state legislature passing a bill that makes it mandatory for schools to teach safe practices on the Internet. I think it’s a shame that schools have to be told to do this, but there’s no doubt that every kid needs to get straight about what he or she should and should not do when navigating the Net. Too many of them aren’t hearing it at home.

But I still think the biggest issue facing our kids when it comes to the Internet is not safety as much as it is basic Web illiteracy among students AND teachers. I’m more worried about the fact that thousands of kids are going to believe much of the junk they read on the Internet without any thought about who is posting it our why. Case in point, which I’ve used before, is the Stormfront (White Aryan Nation) site about Martin Luther King. I know I have voiced my astonishment time and again about how few teachers I meet are able to identify the owners of a particular Website. It happened again recently where only two or three hands went up out of over 100 educators when I showed the site and asked who knew how to find the domain registration.

Why don’t we write law requiring teachers and students to learn about that?

New on The Hyperliterature Exchange for February 2006: my review of “The Syllabary”, a work-in-progress by Peter McCarey, which maps all the monosyllabic words in the English/Scottish language onto a huge grid, and will eventually include a short poem for every one of them.

“Whatever its merits or demerits as a piece of new media, The Syllabary undoubtedly succeeds as a piece of writing. The originality of its concept and the ’sound poem’ of monosyllables would make it worth a visit by themselves: but what makes it worth going back to time after time is the unfailingly high quality of the little poems it contains…”

Colleges’ spending on information technology has rebounded from cuts made in recent years and is expected to set a record this academic year, a new study concludes. (The Chronicle, subscription required)

Here are some high-points from Dave Sifry’s February State of the Blogospher report, based on analysis of Technorati’s search statistics 75,000 new weblogs are appearing every day 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after they started their weblog 2.7 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly…. Watch what they do, what they post about, and what they link to as input to a new kind of display - a piece of media that showed you the most interesting posts and conversations that related to a topic area, like food, or technology, or politics, or PR.

The day’s lesson was on economics and culture. The other goal: to foster international understanding, connecting high school students in America with their counterparts in Germany. As events unfolded at Ganesha High School in Pomona on Thursday, that woul

As Gulf Coast school leaders grapple with how to rebuild educational infrastructures in an area of the country that ranks near the bottom in terms of student achievement, many in the devastated region are asking how educational technology can play a role

Schools embrace video production and videoconferencing. Text may be here to stay, but that isn’t stopping K-12 schools from broadening their curriculum offerings to include audio, video, and other multimodal styles of communication. A combination of savv