Blog Juice for Educational Technology

When you are on the road, you can not avoid CNN. It’s in the Airport. CNN, and its ilk, comprise at least 80% of the TV channels in most hotels (trying to get you to resort to their $12 movies on demand).
The other day, I was working on a presentation in the airport […]

Aside from traffic, I had a good day yesterday, working with superintendents and directors of technology from Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam Counties, New York. The group was very receptive with good questions peppered in. I had an hour and a half to deliver what is usually an hour long presentation. It’s amazing […]

If you have grown weary of newsprint coming off on your hands or just carting around a number of books, Manybooks.net may prove to be quite a handy application. From their homepage, visitors can download literally thousands of works for their PDA’s. The t

While most subscribers to the Scout Report may have heard of Chicago Public Radio’s own “This American Life” radio program, those who have not may truly appreciate an introduction to their delightful website. Since the show debuted in 1995, it has garnere

Based in New York, the Teachers Network is an alliance of education professionals dedicated to disseminating best-practices throughout the world of public school education. On the homepage, visitors can click through a selection of lesson plans, essays by

Some good news from the New York Times:
African-Americans are steadily gaining access to and ease with the Internet, signaling a remarkable closing of the “digital divide” that many experts had worried would be a crippling disadvantage in achieving success.
Civil rights leaders, educators and national policy makers warned for years that the Internet was bypassing blacks […]

MySpace has been in the news again, this time because of the role it played in organizing the recent protests across the country (but primarily in California and Arizona) against the immigration bill. The first thing that jumps out to me, at least is that MySpace is now officially a “social networking site,” not just […]

A few weeks back I wrote about Google offering hosted Gmail to organizations for use as their mail platform. I went ahead and signed up and last week got an email indicating that we could take part. With some help from my service provider, Clarity-Innovations, I have set up mail going to lewiselementary.org to utilize Gmail. So far I…

On today’s posts the fifth graders at BlogWrite discussed their recent podcasting experience where they gave their suggestions and insights on blogging to second graders.
I love Jason’s title for his blog post, Inspiration for the next generation. I know he won’t mind if I borrow it. Now he’s a fifth grader talking to second graders. […]

The folks over at the CCCC Blogging SIG are taking the blog by the horns in terms of beginning to gather some impirical research about the effects of blogs in the classroom. I still think it’s weird that no one has published any results of studies with this tool yet. I may have to carve out a few hours to go digging around some more. They’ve also got some other things on the agenda. One of my favorite snippets is this one:

…we need to move the profession towards a space where we’re more aware of blogging as professional activity. To what degree can we “get credit” for blogging? And, deriving from that, how can we start thinking about blogging as professionals? (One question that was asked in response: if blogging becomes a professional activity, does it lose some portion of its value as teaching/writing tool?)

Wow…we’re finally getting serious about this stuff, huh? Good questions that we’re all grappling with on some level, and I’ll be interested to see how things progress.

So Chris Sessums is learning from his blog by deconstructing his learning, on his blog, which is what this is really all about. I know I sound like a snob when I start talking or writing about how blogging is an intellectual exercise, but that’s what this is for me, and I think his post today is a good example of what I mean. I also like the way he defines the scope of what teachers can do with a blog:

1. Modeling: the teacher “puts his/her mind on display”
2. Coaching: teachers observe students performance of a task, offering feedback
3. Scaffolding: helping a student complete a task slightly more difficult than the student is capable of completing on his/her own.
4. Articulating: drawing students out dialogically, helping to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge
5. Reflecting: debriefing, replaying and discussion after an activity
6. Exploring: students tackle new areas on their own

What’s interesting to me is how the items in that list have less to do with teaching than facilitating and creating a learning environment. And thanks to a bit of Web serendipity, I stumbled across this relevant link in one of my del.icio.us feeds today excerpting Carl Rogers’ “Freedom to Learn”. There’s more than what I’m snipping here, but this will give you the gist of what he has to say:

a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.
b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.
d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher…

Like I said, there is much more to it that needs reading in order to fully understand his ideas. But the learning here for me at least is an even more heightened sense that blogs can be spaces for self directed learning, and that to use them well as teachers, we may need to stop thinking about how to teach with them as much as focus on how we might bring them into our own practice to model what our students can do with them.

Secretary Spellings testified on American competitiveness and education before the House Committee on Science.

A bill passed today by the U.S. House of Representatives to reauthorize the Higher Education Act contains a provision to make sure distance-education students are who they say they are. Under the legislation, accreditors that evaluate online programs or institutions must require colleges to have a way to verify that the student who registers for the course is the same student who completes the course at a distance. Accrediting officials say they should be able to handle the new requirement without difficulty.