EduBlog Insights

Last week my Wrinkles group were blogging following these steps:

1. read news stories

2. wrote about what they read

3. published their news item to the home page and are hoping for responses

4. will read more next week

I posted more about this here but time is a major problem in this group as I only have them for two hours.  I thought about this all this past week and I think I came up with a possible solution today.  We spent the first part of the class commenting back to those who had made comments to them.  Then they learned how to join and post comments on each other’s sites.  We worked on our Idioms site and then students took the time to browse through the student news sites to find articles of interest to them. They made links to the news sites on their navigation bar on their weblogs. Then they printed the news articles and are taking them home to read.  They will come in next class with a rough draft of what they wish to post.  I’m working at having them include the 5 W’s and then close with their thoughts about the article.  Then they will pose a though-provoking question and hope someone out there will read and respond.  I do think I will probably have to set up the audience - have had that in the back of my mind for some time. Today was a good day and we are working out the wrinkles!

They enjoyed today.  We felt less rushed.  We’re working this out.

 <via Kairosnews>

Dr. Jennifer Bay from Purdue is teaching an advanced professional writing course, English 515, where weblogs are definitely on the agenda! For starters, they read weblog articles and compile a brief list of characteristics about the weblogs . For the first five weeks of the semester, they will be studying the weblog as a new form of publishing.  Here’s the course description. See the weblog project assignment. They have to develop and maintain a weblog over the semester. It is a comprehensive workshop.  Writing and weblogs are front and center.  I’ll be following this class.

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David Smith teaches  English at Radley College, near Oxford, England.  He maintains three weblogs and he explains each one in his ‘About Me’.

www.drsnet.org/radley,

a focus on the net for his work at Radley

www.drsnet.org/internet_jottings

news about developments in computing, associated technology and the web

www.drsnet.org/preoccupations,

collated ideas about weblogging, wikis, social software, etc. and their use in education

Of course, ‘preoccupations’ is the weblog of most interest to me.

More and more educators are on board daily and it is interesting to see what they find of note to blog.  He points to Elizabeth Fullerton’s English IV class.  Her ‘welcome back’ post on January 4, 2004 is as follows:

Here are some sites that I’ve found that I have no idea whether our filter will let you use them or not:
*Diaryland
*easyjournal
*freeopendiary and
* Xanga

These are the rules for your web log:

1. You may not identify anyone that you know personally by their last name. You may only identify them by their first name and their initial.
2. You may not write anything that is not acceptable for school. In other words, no profanity, harassing statements, or anything of a sexual nature is to be written.
1.Remember that anyone can view your site: your classmates, your teachers, your parents, the principals, school board members, as well as people you have never met .
4. Do not post any personal information that identifies yourself. For example, your address, phone number, email address. You should come up with a pen name to identify yourself and make sure that I’m aware of what it is.
5. If you have not signed and returned the form required by the board of education to use the internet at school, you must do so by next Monday.
6. Once you have created your web log, you must email me the url or web address of the web log, I will periodically check to make sure that you are posting the required number of posts.
7. You need to have comments enabled on your web log.
8. You should never get involved in flame wars. And you should always ignore trolls.
9. Think hard before you come up with the name of your site. Make it something creative and eyecatching. Once you have named your blog, you can’t change it.

The most important thing you need to do besides creating your blog is that you need to decide what beat you are going to cover. Is this going to be just a personal journal or will you actually find a topic which interests you and write about that (popular music, sports, reality television, getting ready to go to college or anything else which interests you.) Many blogs are a combination of covering some topic and the author’s personal life. Your opinion is always going to be an important part of your blog. There are some links on the left sidebar that will help you to understand writing and pubishing on the internet. It will be worth your while to read them.

Have a great week and make sure you check back here regularly to see what is going on in here. Leave a comment so that I know that you have read this entire post.

Your first post(s): After you have read my posts 100 things about myself which continues through parts II, III, and IV
Take the time to write a similar post to mine telling me 100 things about yourself. This will help me get to know you better. Have fun.

She rates this blog as the best student blog she’s seen so far

http://kanriyu.blogdrive.com/

One link truly does lead to another.  I find it fascinating - all these educational weblogs just keep popping up and each has its own unique voice. I get lost in the weblog maze…….

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Straight from Blogger Blog:

Check your neighborhood
One of the very coolest utilities around for bloggers is the TouchGraph Google Browser. This handy thing will give you a visualization of your “neighborhood” –that is, a map of sites Google considers similar to your site. A node is created that connects to other nodes that connect to, well, you get the idea.

You can click on one of your neighborhood sites and get a description of the site and a link.  You can drag it around and do lots of other things.  I just couldn’t figure out how to print it.  I’ve got so many connections - this is going to take me a while.  Try it out- it’s fascinating.

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wwwtools for Education published Themes and Trends for 2004.  They have a comprehensive ‘list of lists’, more themes for the coming year, and provide some sample items dealing with some of the topics.

Weblogs and RSS are listed under genres.

From the article:

Weblogs and RSS (Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication):

• Blogging and RSS - The “What’s It?” and “How To” of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators  (Will Richardson /

Information Today: January 11, 2004) .

• Ed Blogging 2003   (Will Richardson / Weblogg-ed: December 30, 2003) - notable edbloggers; how best to use this technology in education; major edblogging questions.

•  Blog Herald  - a specialist newsblog.    

Under resources and references:

The Edinburgh Scenarios  (Learning Circuits Blog: January 01, 2004) - what is the future of elearning, and the elearning industry? participate in developing scenarios, and maybe win a prize.

Under offtopic updates:

  # Big List of Blog Search Engines  (Ari Paparo’s blog)

I just pulled out the weblog references but this newsletter has pulled together a comprehensive digest! I have only read a bit of it but it’s one I know I’m coming back to soon.  Lots of great resources listed! If you don’t subscribe to wwwtools for education, consider it.  They are a wonderful resource.

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James Farmer from Incorporated Subversion is back and we in the edublogging community are glad!  He has added Incorporated Poetry blog.  Good on ya, James! Welcome back!

The Electronic Village (EV) Online Sessions 2004 will start on January 26 and end on March 5. You do NOT have to be a member of TESOL, nor do you have to register for TESOL 2004, to take part in these FREE events. The session I am involved with is ‘Creating and using weblogs in ESL/EFL’.  I will be one of 4 moderators.  The other moderators are Sandy Peters, Aaron Campbell, and Joe Luft. The session will target ESL/EFL teachers with little or no experience in creating blogs who would like to use this technique for educational purposes, but don’t know how to get started.  We will be introducing participants to free weblog hosting software.  Registrations for the session will be accepted January 12-26.

I am excited to be a part of this endeavor.  Last year Sandy and I had a session on creating an online magazine. It was a lot of fun.  For this years weblog session, we have changed the description a little from the current online posted version.  Here are the topics:

• Getting started

• Exploring weblogs

• Weblog Think-Abouts

• Creating our Weblogs

• Focusing on features of weblogs

• Finding our voices and building a community

• Wrapping it up

If you know any ESL/EFL people who would be interested, let them know about this session. Some of you had expressed interest and if you would like to sign up, please do!  You don’t have to build a blog if you already have one but perhaps you could offer some encouraging comments to those new to the world of blogging.  We are trying to keep the process very simple yet effective. (no small task, huh?)  We don’t want to overwhelm them.  We are trying to show good esl/efl examples and show the possibilities.  It will springboard off of a yahoo discussion group.  We’ll be using a weblog for the syllabus - a week at a time.  We probably will create a group weblog for fun close to the end of the process.

If you have any questions, let me know.

A while back I had written a post, Blogs Breed Western Corruption,  about blogs in Iran. The Iranian youth were having to fight hard to even have a voice. 

An Online Journalism Review Article, Iranian Journalist Credits Blogs for Playing Key Role in His Release from Prison , tells how bloggers can make a difference, especially when they band together for a serious cause. Sina Motallebi, a jailed journalist/blogger, sparked an online petition drive demanding his freedom. 

Quote from the article:

“Freedom is vital to Iran now and Weblogs are a means of freedom,” said blogger Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, in an email to Sina Motallebi. “Beyond that, note that many of the Iranian Webloggers pushed their fellow bloggers to start writing in English so they could get their story out to the rest of the world. This is crating an amazing bridge, from person to person, nation to nation, media to media.”

Read the whole article - the world is changing and weblogs are getting voices heard in many places where freedom of speech has not existed. I hope more voices will continue to be heard.

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My neice Stormy pointed me to this interesting blog.  The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has a Behavior and Health Weblog. This Blog discusses how to prevent, intervene, and modify public behaviors to improve public health outcomes. It says the leading causes of morbidity and mortality include violence, smoking, obesity, and HIV infection. The question for them is “how can we most effectively change behavior to improve health?”

I like the way this blog ecourages input. Issues relevant to education are certainly being addressed.  Hmmmm, seems like this type of blog would be a good one for educational issues.  It would be a good place to start for educational leadership.  They could find issues of concern among the community. Asking the right question would be the key.  I like the way the question is at the center of the blog. The user policy was an interesting read.  It does make you think. Johns Hopkins seems to always be on the cutting edge.
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I love this book, Because Writing Matters, that I am rereading for the umpteenth time. I know I have talked about it before but I wanted to share a few things I read today.  First, two quotes that are great:

“Teachers can have students write to discover, create and explore their thinking, dig up prior knowledge, to cultivate intellectual independence, to conjecture about possibilities, to struggle with difficult concepts, and to engage the imagination as an ally in learning.”

 

from Tom Romano, Clearing the Way: Working with Teenage Writers

 

“Many state writing assessments run the risk of undercutting good writing by scoring only for focus, organization, style, and mechanics without once asking judges to consider whether the writing is powerful, memorable, provocative, or moving (all impact-related criteria, and all at the heart of why people read what others write.)”

 

from Grant Wiggins, Educative Assessment, p. 67

 

Take a look at the key points in the book. This book is a must read for those interested in the teaching of writing. Any of you administrators out there - Chapter 6 - “What Administrators Can Do to Create Effective Writing Programs”- is really good.  Hear, hear, Tim and Joe!