Blog Juice for Educational Technology

The flu bug hit me with a vengeance. Don’t these bugs know to leave us alone during the summer months? Anyway I got back to work yesterday and now I am playing catch-up.
I have a professor who is interested in putting one of her class assignments totally online. Of course, I think blogs and believe […]

The activity going on over at Blog2Learn is amazing! I am having so much fun browsing through the blogs. Assesment plans from O’Reilly’s Blog, how-to directions from the Byrd House, interesting musings on directions to take with blogging from Browder’s Site, and Project Group 3 (Kim, Chris, and Julie) have already created their own […]

I am going to second Will’s post, A Great Day in Kennesaw! What an awesome group of teachers! I can hear that creative buzz of the teachers planning and thinking on the blogs all the way from Kennesaw State to here at Georgia State in downtown Atlanta. I love it!
Yesterday I started the day just […]

“I hate the French….” exploded a former student. I was taken aback and speechless for a moment. I was working with a group of fifth graders on a current events project in one of my technology classes in an elementary school. I stopped, and told the student that while I did respect that this was […]

My day begins with a click on Bloglines and then the windows of learning begin to unfold. Ahhh, so many opportunities. Shall I go here? Shall I go there? Oh, the places I can go…..
For instance, this morning I clicked on one of my favorite reads, Alan Levine’s CogDogBlog. My first stop […]

This past Tuesday I visited the class of a University of Georgia colleague, Gretchen Thomas. She invited me to be a guest speaker on my favorite topic, blogs and education. Several in the class knew about blogs but the definitions were consistently those of it being an online journal only. I love being able to […]

I’ve had WordPress for a while now and it seems Sam is getting all the kinks, transfers, etc. squared away. Sam DeVore has been hard at work getting all of the old manila feed addresses redirected to my blog, among the many other helpful things he continues to do. Thank-you Sam! I am […]

I’m traveling back to Miss Neville’s class in the morning. I was getting ready to post on the class blog
and got sidetracked by comments. What blogger can resist reading comments? On the class blog the JHH fifth grade
bloggers
are welcoming these kids to the world of blogging. It is
powerful. What I love is that they are firing away with questions- questions
addressed to the group! I always encourage my groups to end up a blog post
with a thought provoking question. Encourage the conversations. I say good questions from this group.  Angel asks “Why
do you want to blog with your kids and why?” He gets right to the
point. Great questions all around from this sharp little group.Once
again I was sidetracked as I started reading their posts. I had to make a few comments.

One of my goals was to be sure to write a comment a day. Many days I do
more. I’m going to keep that goal and try to keep that goal to the
forefront.

Friday afternoon I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Tim Tyson, the principal of Mabry Middle School. I had blogged about his take on Friedman’s book, The World is Flat on an earlier post, He thinks it is essential
reading for every parent of every child at Mabry Middle School and
should even be required reading for most of the students, at least in
the 8th grade. Hear! Hear!

We had
connected through our blogs and exchanged a couple of emails but it was
really nice to talk to him about blogging and other aspects of
technology. If you have not taken a look at mabry online
you need to do so. Right at the top there is a link to Under the Hood
of Our Website….  One excerpt from this explanation:

There’s even a printout that
readers can print that gives a flow chart of the organization. I love
how all this is explained for readers. Dr. Tyson is not only educating
his students but the public as well.

My day began by reading this quote…..

“Write daily for 15 to 30 minutes.  Many scholars believe that
writing requires big blocks of time.  They’re wrong. 
Research shows that scholars who write daily publish far more than
those who write in big blocks of time.  The problem with big
blocks of time is that they’re hard to find.  In contrast, when
you write daily, you start writing immediately because you remember
what you were writing about the day before.  This leads to
impressive production. “

This came from Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing list. The author is Tara Gray. This reading led me to this thought and hope….

Picture tomorrow’s schools. At schools across the nation writing is
considered of paramount importance. The day begins with everyone
writing on their own personal school blog. The first 15 minutes of each
day is reserved to reflect on what they have learned, what they wish to
learn, or to explore some aspect of their learning. Teachers, staff and
administrators do the same. Writing is valued by our society. Time is
provided for discussion about what is learned from the writing. Blogs
are viewed as places to have honest, open dialogue about issues of the
day. Writing helps the students become better readers and thinkers.
Students and teachers are learning from each other. as they reflect
crtically from available information and understandings. Assessments of
student learning are easily made through these blogs so the need for
standardizing testing as a single unit to measure achievement has been
eliminated, Previous time spent testing is now spent writing.

I’m feeling a little “scattered, covered & smothered”. There’s Del.icio.us, Skype, Talk Digger, TagCloud, BlogPulse, and ScuttlEDU. How about BlinkList, Ice Rocket, H2O Jots, Bloglines, and Elgg?  Then we have the complete  tool collection for Del.icio.us that will make your Del.icio.us experience even better as well as, the great Flickr tools collection for Flickr.
This is just mentioning a few of the many tools available. In addition,
our tools have extensions, modifications, plug-ins and enhancements.
Decisions have to be made. Should
I Furl it , Flickr it, Send it, or better yet Fling It?

Yikes!  As I explore all these tools I keep finding the most
interesting links and instead of learning and comparing the tools for
possible classroom use I am off exploring content here, there, and everywhere. and.  Aha!  Today
I found TechCrunch. It’s
a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing every newly
launched web 2.0 business, product and service. Just what I needed,
huh? Does anyone have a tool to make you feel a little less “scattered, covered & smothered?

Something is really wrong with staff development in our schools when articles like this continue to flourish. Listen to the last paragraph:


“It’s no longer about individuals making choices about whether they
want to grow and learn,” said Ms. Hirsh of the National Staff
Development Council.” We have to narrow the scope of what we offer to
teachers and use it in a more deliberate way.”



Now it’s not this article in
particular. It’s just that I probably have read hundreds along a
similar vein. I really tire of all the discussion that goes on outside
our schools. I’d like to see some discussions from those inside the
school. Why don’t we put the focus on letting schools be responsible
for their own learning? We should work to make our schools learning
communities that are models for our students.

Just think, not only would you be building a dynamic learning community
but the entire school would be writing. Writing to learn, to explore
our thinking, to make needed changes and to think about possibilities.
What better model could we provide for our students?