EduBlog Insights

I love those moments in time when we get to meet face-to-face with others in our Bloglines accounts. Seeing Will again today was really special and it was fun watching the teachers enjoy his presentation. He always does a good job! Now he’s off to Florida for the EduComm Conference. I’m with him in hoping this becomes a habit- really thoughtful approaches to implementing blogging in schools. I do like the sound of that.

Take a look at the Blog2Learn project. This is the way it should be done. Dr. Earl Holliday, Mike Keleher and Leonard Witt from Kennesaw State University conceived the “Improving Language Arts Instruction through the Use of Weblogs” project. Project details are available at Blog2Learn. Leonard Witt did a superb job of blogging Will’s day on PJNet. In my previous posts I pointed you to two of his posts. Here is his wrap-up of Will’s day. It’s appropriate that it’s about inviting the kids. Leonard tops it off with this quote:

The key message I heard from the day is that this is all about networking and collaboration. The classroom really is the whole globe, we just have to learn to tap into it.

The participants are Georgia middle and high school language arts teachers. It is exciting to be part of a project that is providing this kind of support for classroom teachers.

Today Will focused on The Tools of the Trade: How to Read and Write to Blogs. My part tomorrow is Blogging in the Classroom: Best Practices in Educational Blogging.

Now one special feature that I have planned is a couple of Skype conversations – one with Lani Ritter Hall and one with Darren Kuropatawa. The participants are in for a treat!

Now if you get a chance, please comment on the teachers’ blogs and give them a “good blogging welcome”! The teacher blogs are here. The blogs need to have the comment feature enabled and some other work but that will happen. They will get your comments. This whole project is off to a great start! I can’t wait for tomorrow!
Here’s the wiki with my presentation outline. I plan to add other content area blogs and other edublog resources to this wiki. later. I invite participation.

A continuation of the workshop by Will from PJNet.

Now Will is explaining RSS. These teachers are asking good questions. I am really impressed with the help that has been built-in for them. After this week long workshop they each have 10 hours on demand training/support. Incredible!

I just arrived at Kennesaw University and Will is doing a great job. Let me point you to a synopsis from PJNet. Wow! Some really good writing here.

I wish I had gotten here a bit earlier for this….

He just dialed into George Siemens who blogs at Connectivism Blog on Skype. Turns out Siemens was sitting in a cafe in Europe getting ready for a conference. Any teacher he said could do the same in their classrooms.