Blogbinders.com is a link I found on Peter Ford’s site. It is so cool. You can turn your blog into a bound book. Peter’s right, it could have great implications for education. I’m thinking how much fun that will be to give to my 85 year old mother who is still blogging away at Vera’s Corner!
Now I know that there is no way I can get to this conference in Switzerland, but one can dream…
Seb posts on a Symposium on personal Webpublishing and Weblogs at EdMedia 2004 Listen to these topics….
Wow! I want to hear each and every one of them. Seb also pointed us to EdMedia 2004 Symposium proposal (pdf) which contains a more complete look at what they are going to present. The whole presentation looks outstanding. As I said, one can dream……. so I will have to count on Seb to fill us in later with as many details as possible. I learn so much from him. His weblog is an excellent learning source.
Yesterday Dave Winer called for a vision for the next generation of blogging tools. At my last check he had an incredible response - 93 comments and growing! Wow! Some of the requests, if implemented, would be fantastic. It just has my mind clicking. Check them out to see if you can think of anything to add.
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I came across an interesting site from from Yahoo! Picks called Memeorandum with the tagline…Fresh brewed news plus stewing views
This news site takes the most-linked-to-stories and then displays comments from bloggers on the topic. No attempt is made to separate so-called “straight news” from op-ed, editorial, or other pieces that disclaim objectivity. Any judgment of fairness is left solely to the reader. Memeorandum was created and is operated by a media amateur with no party affiliation or political experience and the site states efforts were made to include voices on both sides.
Hmmmm. This could make for an interesting assignment for students. Pick a news item and then try to find two opposing weblog views. Or better yet, pick a news item and then write two posts that include two opposing views. Hmmmm… other possibilities abound…..
Nancy of blahblahbog has empowered some of her elementary school teachers with weblogs and they are blogging away and showing their students how to make connections with comments. Her post here tells about these creative California bloggers.
The Mozart Concept/Question Blog comes from Miss Gomez’s second grade class. They’re blogging about poetry, the arts in their school, meanings of words, and animals who camouflage and those that don’t and why! What fun!
Learning is Fun is the interesting work of a third grade teacher and her class. They have just finished a language arts unit on imagination. On her first trek blogging with her class she poses the following question: What is imagination and how do you know? You will have to check out some of their clever answers.
We’ve Got a World of Ideas comes from Mrs. P’s 5th grade bloggers. They are sharing idioms, comparing states, and will be collaborating with my Wrinkles group. Hooray!
It is so good to see some more elementary sites emerging on the scene. Good work, Nancy!
Soon I’ll be spotlighting some of the weblogs coming out of the online session Creating and using weblogs in ESL/EFL.
Came across an interesting bit of information <via> PC World.
)?Thinking & Writing Wrinkles
http://anvil.gsu.edu/wrinkles
NewsQuest
http://anvil.gsu.edu/NewsQuest
Education/Technology - Tim Lauer
http://tim.lauer.name/
Lewis Elementary School
http://lewiselementary.org/
The Contner Corner
http://manila.cet.middlebury.edu/contnerconnection/
Magnolia Mustangs
http://mustangblog.typepad.com/
Mrs. Britton’s Class
http://mustangblog.typepad.com/mrsbrittonsclass/
Intel’s Innovation Odyssey
A Place to Be Heard
http://www97.intel.com/education/odyssey/day_300/day_300.htm
A Space of Your Own
http://www97.intel.com/odyssey/Story.aspx?storyid=302
Leading the Way
http://www97.intel.com/odyssey/Story.aspx?storyid=346
Going Paperless
http://www97.intel.com/odyssey/Story.aspx?storyid=355
I think Will and I must be on the same wave length with comments. Yesterday on his Journalism 2 weblog he assigned his students Something Different. He asked his students to go on a quest……. ”to read their colleagues Weblogs and find some real gems that the rest of us can benefit from.” His students are ”commenting away” and making some really astute observations.
I loved reading the comments his students made and guess what! I am going to take some of the comments back to my Wrinkles students as good examples. There were so many good comments and I could only pick a few. All of his students need to know that every single one of them had good things written, but I only have a two hour session. I have probably tried to squeeze in too many already. Choosing was definitely not easy. Here’s the lesson, Learning from other student voices!, for my students. It’s going to be fun! There will be a whole lot of learning going on!
So Will’s students are being teachers again, although indirectly this time. That is what is so cool to me - using the different voices to learn from each other. We just have got to get more students voices in this whole mix. Will is doing a super job with his students. The students themselves are wonderful writers. They’re fast becoming one of my favorite reads.
I just noted Will’s post today where he follows up and reminds his students of the collective greatness of his class and how they need to encourage and continue to share. This is what educational weblogs are all about.. the voices.
A previous post, Making Connections with Comments, was one I came back to today with my Wrinkles group. I think we made a great leap today. I love it when the learning comes alive. These students are indeed taking good thinking a step further. In turn, the process is going to help them become better writers.
Let me explain. Last week we worked on editing. Hard, hard, hard for fifth graders…. They had written stories where they were to use as many idioms as they could. They swapped papers and shared reactions about the papers. Mostly they would say the story was good, they enjoyed it, it was great, etc. Nice comments yes, but helpful for a struggling writer…no.
Today I handed out printed copies of the idiom stories. Each one had one of their peer’s papers. The task was to read it and write out a specific comment that would include a suggestion for the writer that the writer would find helpful. Once they had written out their comments, each one read it out loud and we discussed the comments as a group. Then each students fine-tuned the original response. This is hard but these students tackled the task and worked through it and came up with some good specific comments for their classmates. Then we were off to the lab to work on our weblogs.
Yes, comments can be an avenue where we teachers can take learning a step further. I bet we could think of lots of other ways to use the comment feature to keep on making good connections.
Listen to the students…..
>Amber suggests that Jackie include more details on one part of the story but during her editing process looks up an idiom herself and learns the true meaning….
Jackie, your story was sensational! It flowed right on from the title to the end. I think you could have added a little more detail in the sentence where you said, “every cloud has a silver lining.” I am not sure what you meant by it. I looked it up and I believe it means… there is always something good in a bad situation. Your mom knew it was an accident and gave you a hug to show that she still loves you!
Jerry requests clarification from Derrick…..
Derrick, I think that you have a good story, but in some parts I didn’t understand what you meant like the pat you said that they were washing their hands of something. Could you add to that part to make it more specific? Keep up the good work!
Emily compiles a concise list of suggesions for Jennifer….
I absolutely LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE the story! Everything fits well and the idioms were used in the right way. To make it even better you could……
Derrick advises Yoceline about the past tense….
Yoceline, your story was great but I caught that in the first sentance, Call needs to be called because it is past tense. In the 3rd sentence I figured that you could either have a period or make she lower case, but over all it was Great.
As an aside, I love Yoceline’s ending to her story….
“Wrinkles is the best of the four corners of the earth.” I agree! Don’t you think Yoceline hit the nail right on the head?
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Modeling writing is one of the links on the FordLog. He lists some examples of writing he completed on his class weblogs. Peter goes on to say that he “believes that if we want students to become habitual writers then we must model the process.”
His post is well worth reading about the role of the teacher in habitual writing and audience.
An excerpt:
“What this does highlight for me is the crucial role that the teacher/editor/facilitator plays in developing a fledgling community of student webloggers - whatever form it may take, young or old, structured or chaotic. Providing the audience is not the challenge - weblogs are a ‘killer ap’ in this regard. What blogs can’t do however, is change a student’s view on writing in general and their own writing in particular. This is where the teacher/facilitator can play such a positive or negative role. I believe this is true at both primary school and university level.”
Peter sums it up by stating that “Defining a teaching methodology for encouraging weblogging amongst students is just as crucial as providing everyone with their own blog.”
As usual, there are lots of good posts on his site. His post on Arts Alive is going to be a great help to my Wrinkles group. I’ve been looking for good reads on keeping art and music in our curriculums. This site is great. Any of you know of others?
Peter always gets to the heart of the matter. I like that.