EduBlog Insights

Al Delgado, on his excellent blog, Educational Weblogs, points us to the Big List of Blog Search Engines. It is a comprehensive listing of blog search engines. The author, Ari Paparo, provides instructions on where to submit your blog in each search engine. He also includes a link the the Big List of International Blog Search Engines. I haven’t made the effort to include my blog in search engines. Do a lot of you do this? One reason I haven’t is because of my unreliable rss feed. Shortly I will be moving to a new site. Even though my feed appears to be working now, who knows how long that might last. Can a feed be cantankerous?  Well, maybe not, but  ”Murphy” can and when he gets a hold on it, he seldom lets it go!

One thing I can always rely on is getting good information and interesting posts from Al. If you have not visited any of his sites, you should. Here are his links:

Educational Weblogs

EdBlogger Praxis

Manila Education Weblog Portal

Movable Type Education Weblog Portal

Radio Education Weblog Portal

TypePad Education Weblog Portal

Joyce Hooper, the principal of J. H. House Elementary School is doing a great job with her weblog that she started this year. Her most recent post was sent to the students about thankfulness.  It is well worth the read as we approach this Thanksgiving holiday.

I am thankful for so many things but I wanted to take a moment and say a special thanks to all the members of the educational blogging community. The perspective of the many different voices is awesome! I love the sharing of the thinking, the different ways we approach things, what is top on our minds, what is making a difference, how we can use technology to empower our students……

I wish you and your families a wonderful Thanksgiving!

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High Stakes Testing and Assessment is an article written by Carol Holzberg for TechLearning. It is a very thorough and well-organized article about the continuing controversy on the best way to measure learning.

Of particular interest to me is this section:

State Has Strange Way with words

Tribune staff reporter Tracy Dell’Angela, describes how standardized tests profoundly impact the way students write when they are taught to write essays in a formulaic (five-paragraph and three-topic) way to facilitate automated essay grading by machines. As a result, even students in poorly performing schools can pass the standardized writing test. Visit the Web site to learn whether writing quality and creativity have suffered because young writers have little incentive to exceed the low standards. The Education Week article, “State Tests Influence Instruction, Research Says” shows what happens when teachers shift instruction to focus on what is tested.

Can you imagine if we required the five-paragraph and three-topic essay as a model for weblogs? We truly need to think long and hard about how writing is taught in many of our classrooms and our understanding of how it can affect learning. Writing is the main reason I got hooked on weblogs. It’s a place to make writing the focus for our students. Students need to write more across all content areas and they need to be involved in a wide range of writing activities. Start your own weblog. It will show your students that you think writing is important. Then get your students writing on weblogs. They will see that their writing is important.

Plus, we need to keep an eye on assessing writing not just for paragraphs, mechanics and organization but also does it have a distinct voice?, is it powerful? might it make someone pause and think? is it moving?

Weblogs provide a way for us to give students the needed practice to improve in writing. At the same time, it can be a very motivating force for students to get excited about writing!

Recently I had posted about Julie McCullers post, A Final Goodbye. She posted the following:

Exploring the power and possibility of putting weblogs to good educational use- that works for me! How about you? Join this growing group of webloggers! Include your students! Share the learning! Weblogs work in education!

via (The Blog Herald)

Leading internet scholar addresses blogs in education is an article by Kirten Martin of the Daily Barometer. Laura J. Gurak from the University of Minnesota spoke at Oregon State to discuss the Internet as a communication technology and its implications on writing for this current generation of college students.

It seems the lecture turned into a spirited debate over whether blogs, specifically, were indeed a form of writing, and how they could be of use in teaching writing. 

Excerpts from the article:

For many students, Gurak said, blogging can be a useful method of improving writing.

As blogs are a public medium with an intended audience, “It might encourage students to think more about what they are doing,” she said, adding that they might be more apt to incorporate accountability and structure into their writing.

Furthermore, Gurak pointed out, blogs encourage a very voluntary, participatory sort of atmosphere, where many students seem to enjoy interacting outside the classroom.

Then this, which gave me pause:

In her second lecture of the day, Gurak used a University of Minnesota class as an example for effective use of blogs as a classroom tool. A class Web page was replaced by a student-run class blog, whose student participation tended to drop off if the professor began posting.

“It’s the ‘chill’ factor of the professor (his or her presence),” she said, as to whether or not students would embrace professor interaction in a student-run blog environment. Many students enjoy the sense of anonymity the online community provides. On blogs, “Spelling doesn’t matter,” Gurak said. “I’m glad people are (just) talking.”

I’ve seen lots of good examples where professors blogged right with the class. It depends on the purpose, what has been set up, etc. Spelling is not the main focus but it’s important in that it gives us an opportunity to stress to students the importance of proofing work that will be read by many.

Blogging is on the agenda now-a-days and writing is the topic. That’s great!

iPods at the Gate is an interesting article from Campus Technology ((from the Syllabus Media Group) that explores the use of iPods. It points to the potential in areas such as language immersion, where students can continually hear and record the language as part of the learning process.

At Georgia College and State University, Randall Thursby, the vice chancellor for Information and Instructional Technology, listens to memos and documents that his assistant has converted through translation software. He does this on his 100 miles each way drive to and from work. He approached his faculty and Hank Edmondson, professor of Government, started downloading songs about war, politics, and Shakespeare to integrate into a couple of his classes. His students also recorded themselves presenting speeches they had chosen from one of the plays they were studying. iPods were updated for the benefit of the entire class; all the students were made responsible for the material recorded by their peers.

Then he went on to use the iPod in an Ethics and Society class. The iPod helped make the material relevant because he could choose a lot of popular music and associate different songs with different philosophies.

The article also explained how the iPod fit in quite nicely with study abroad. Students could listen to lectures on the trains headed to their destinations, thereby not wasting time. Its compact design and massive capacity for storage helped greatly with the students’ light packing restrictions.

The article lists additional URLs for help. Not all are working at the moment so here’s a few I found:

GC&SU iPod Project

A Pocketful of Learning

The iPod Invades Classroom

Walnut immigrant students show computer skills

The possibilities are there but I think, at least in the elementary school setting, that we’re a long way off  from following Duke University’s lead with providing students with iPods. (or even putting them in the hands of one or two faculty members). We could probably never get the funding but it seems to me that there could really be some good possibilities with ESL students.

It’s another tool that let’s us keep exploring possibilities for our classrooms. We really are “at the gate” in discovering the many ways we can use the Web in meaningful ways with students and faculty.

Want to see a good example of a third grade teacher’s classroom blog?

Julie McCullers is a third grade teacher at J.H. House Elementary School. She participated in the third grade weblog workshop that Hillary Meeler and I conducted a couple of weeks ago. I just read a recent post of hers. It is a great example of how you can use a class weblog to “bump up the thinking” by students in classrooms. Her post, “A Final Goodbye” leads her class to think about a memorial service they will be having today to say a final goodbye to OVERUSED WORDS!