EduBlog Insights

Teacher, Mark Barrett, introduced his class to a site called Writing With Writers.  It showcases biographies written by young people around the country. Students get commentary from experts.  It talks about the pro and con.  It discusses the concerns some have for online peer review.  One quote from the article, “If they get rapid feedback from peers, students can’t wait to compose.”

The article lists links for a few networks, web sites and software programs that were built with peer exchange in mind.

One of the links cites Sarah’s Middlebury VT summer graduate program called Breadnet  that paved the way for e-mail exchange programs, pairing students with peers at other schools.

I was reading Powerful Conversations Can Transform Teacher Learning in the Spring 2003 issue of Working Toward Excellence. 

The Alabama Best Practices Center is promoting these Powerful Conversations about staff development.  A self-assessment process is used to promote these conversations about staff development among principals and teachers in schools across the state.

The article states that the conversations are as much about listening as talking. They maintain that you won’t get a true picture of the school’s staff development without a facilitator (outside school) to deepen understanding and push school facilities to think outside the box of traditional in-service programs.

The article lists good questions for schools to ask themselves about staff development. I know at my former school we did something similar to this without an outside facilitator.  Our staff development was great and every teacher was involved.  We talked across grade levels, planned, collaborated, worked and re-worked ideas and then WE decided what staff development we needed to help us meet the needs of the students.  It does take a principal with a vision though.

Gosh, wouldn’t it be great if something like this could be taken to the next level?  Keeping a record of the journey on a weblog would be so helpful for others following.  Since time is usually the reason given for not being able to do many thing, you could alot time during the staff development for reflection, plans, and more thinking outside the box.  (On weblogs, of course!)

An interesting EFL blog created by Graham Stanley has links to student weblogs, a collaborative teacher weblog, a weblog devoted to CALL, a writing discussion weblog, teaching experiences weblog, and other links. I like seeing more and more weblogs coming to the forefront for ESL.

Then I read this article All Over for Blogs? via Stephen Downes Newsletter

Weblogs won’t disappear because, of course, websites won’t disappear. But the hype will ebb and I would say that the number of active blogs will be cut in half over the next six months to a year. Articles will start noticing the glut of abandoned blogs and the format will recede into the background. There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, many more articles that read like this one does. And all of that is OK, that’s how it should be. This will not be the end of anything significant. Remember: hype is not a normal state of affairs for anything, the decline of blogs has been predicted (by me, at least) for more than eight months, and XML (RSS) is still the future. By Bill Thompson, BBC News, August 8, 2003

I love Elizabeth Lane Lawley’s post on her weblog mamamusings, rules? i don’t need no stinkin rules

Everywhere you look these days, bloggers are writing policies and rulebooks. For themselves, for others, for everyone. With calls for accountability, integrity, consistency, appropriateness, and ethical behavior, it seems that every blogger I know is publishing their own set of guidelines for blogging.

Feh. A pox on all their rules, that’s what I say.

I find her posts interesting reading….good food for thought.  I have been bothered about all the calls for rules for weblogs, too. Weblogs are not about control and rules! I can see guidelines if you are setting up some type of classroom weblog but for everyday weblogs that come from such a wide variety of sources and from such good thinkers.  If you find a blog offensive, just don’t read it! I want the dialogue to continue and the voices to be heard! 

She went on to say

I’m not sure I think of (or want to think of) webloggers as a “group”,any more than I want to think of “writers” or “poets” or “programmers” as a group. My weblog is simply a tool that allows me to publish thoughts, questions, and ideas online. It’s not an application for citizenship in “Blogaria” or “Blogistan” or any of the other geographic metaphors people use to describe the diverse collection of self-published websites that blogs have enabled.

I’m not sure I agree with her here.  Yes, it’s a tool. But I think it does build online communities who have a sense of common goals, a respect for each other and a supportive free thinking spirit among themselves. There’s something about the instant publishing and ability to comment so quickly that builds a learning community. You navigate to those blogs with similar interests. Yet, I find myself reading all sorts of weblogs. Some of them are totally opposite of what I believe, yet they make me pause and really think.  I like that.

Yep, food for thought.  I love those kind of posts.  Thanks to Elizabeth Lane Lawley.  Keep it up!

via Bill Brandon’s eLearning

You can apply for and use an International Standard Serial Number for your Weblog. Your blog will then officially exist in the worldwide standardized encyclopedia of periodicals. [ISSN for Weblogs]

What a great idea!

We’re getting more and more official, right?

I used to ask my former principal why she chose such a hard job. She would tell me that she wanted teachers to be empowered and have the support that they needed to get the job done.  She went on to say that it was truly the only position where you had the power to effect change.  This principal had an understanding as to what it’s like to be a teacher.  She provided outstanding inservice, knew the importance of teacher reflection and built in time for that to happen. She always put the needs of the students first before making any decisions, but those decisions were always made with true input from her staff.

Tim announced in his quiet, unassuming way that he will be principal of Meriwether Lewis Elementary School next year.  Kudos to Tim!  Don’t we know that he will effect change? I know he will make a difference in the lives of the children and his staff. 

First, Joe.  Now, Tim.  It is exciting to me to see this kind of talent enter the administrative ranks. 

Plus, just think.  We may even have some cutting-edge weblogging schools showing others the power of weblogging.

Yes, the power of principalship!  Congratulations, Tim!  We all will look forward to following your journey.

We should respond to Steve Outing’s Blogs Have a Place on News Websites with a parallel article that Blogs Have a Place in Education. 

• Last year, I wrote a column for Editor & Publisher Online suggesting that many reporters, correspondents, editors and columnists at newspapers should produce Weblogs. I stand by that advice, but these days I place equal importance on non-staff members producing the content for blogs at news companies.
  Over the past few years, we have been encouraging teachers, administrators, pre-service teachers, student teachers, and others to use Weblogs in the education arena.  We place even more importance on putting this in the hands of our students!

• Weblogs present a wonderful opportunity to get the voices of the public onto your site.
  Weblogs present a wonderful opportunity to get OUR voices heard by the public and each other.  It  presents a wonderful opportunity for students to have an  audience for their writing.  There’s discussion from many, not just a few.

• Blogging actually makes it easier for community members, because of the nature of the format.
  We’ve named it - instant publishing!  Anywhere, anytime, from any browser.  It’s much easier for teachers than learning a program such as Front Page or Dreamweaver and then having to buy and load it on ONE computer.

I see weblogs as a vehicle to open some of these closed doors in our field. We need more voices. There’s power in good use of weblogs. 

I just finished up with a good meeting with Lynne Jordan, an early childhood instructor.  Last semester she used spiral bound notebooks for students to journal and respond to each other about the childrens’ literature books they were studying.  She paired students and they would hand the books back and forth, responding to the other’s journal entry.  She said the collection of all the books was a management nightmare. Enter EduBlogs! 

Lynne and I brainstormed the “how-to’s” of setting it up.  We are going to have different reading roles for the departments and these roles will be springboards to good  discussion. The roles will be designed to invite different thinking and perspectives on the book.  Depending on what book we use, it will be chapter by chapter or specific page assignments.  It will be a student-led discussion group.  The neat thing is that we can eliminate the paper, students can hear from more than one other students (many voices), and Bloglines will make the teacher and student’s life much simpler. Plus, these students are just a semester or two away from student-teaching so they can be thinking of student applications.  Lynne and I are going to try to test-drive a few chapters ourselves on a weblog before we introduce it to the students.  Hooray!  I have an instructor who is ready to dive in herself and  model it for the students!  Who knows where this might lead?

I can’t find this article online but Syllabus has a good article about blogging entitled “Campus Communications & The Wisdom of Blogging”  by Sarah Roberts of Duke University.  Some excerpts:

The number of uses for blogs are limitless.  As a tool for extending learning and encouraging communication and community, blogs are expertly designed to seamlessly integrate the endeavors of many students and faculty.

Consider the undergraduate year-abroad experience.  What if students could have a place to chronicle their experiences in these different cultures and countries?  A homepage for all active blogs by students abroad could be created, featurning the most recent entries and breakdowns by class, year, program or country of study.

In other arenas, blogs could be used to continue particularly lively class discussions cut short by an in-class schedule.  Students could further their arguments with links to other information and evidence to support their positions.

In the pedagogical realm, the uses of blogs are only limited by the imagination.

In the classroom, a professor might document hs or her personal research and allow students to follow their progress via the project’s blog.  Student blogs - the spontaneous transmission of ideas, analysis, knowledge - could be a valuable mechanism for preserivng information for the research community.

The rise of blogging suggests new ways to think about collaboration and communication in the university setting.

New ways to think - it resonates with me.  I was delighted to see an article that included so many possibilities in the university setting.

See the comment below - the article is online now and Stephen Harlow is kind enough to link to it.  Thanks, Stephen!