EduBlog Insights

I’ve got a years worth of lesson plans and the curriculum map for the fifth grade class I will be working with this coming school year on my flash drive. Whew! Just plowing through it makes me think “What are we thinking?” The phrase cover and smother keeps running through my head. I plan to use the curriculum guides as the base to show other ways to teach the material rather than strictly by basal and textbook. My goal is to get the kids blogging their ideas thoughts so we can add that to the pool of knowledge.
I met with the instructional technology specialist at J.H. House today to share my ideas with her for this project. Hillary is great! She did a great job with her Blog Write group this year and plans to do another group in addition to working with me on this project.

The ideas are just swimming in my head. I’ll be working with the whole class. That is so exciting. It’s amazing all the things you have to work out to make this happen. Flexibility is hard to grab hold of in our current classrooms due to the scheduling “tigers” that have to be wrestled to make the whole process work and make sure the kids get all that is required and expected.

I’m also trying to work out a research piece with a professor at Georgia State. Many hoops have to be jumped through to make that happen so wish me well. This has always been the area where I wish I knew more about and how to conduct it correctly. I’m learning a lot from this professor in that area. She happened across some of my blog work with students and was impressed and invited me to her class last semester. We’ve been networking ever since and plan some collaboration between her classes this year and the fifth graders. She wants her students to get first hand experience. So wish me luck on the research piece. I really hope that can happen!
I am also in the process of transferring all my past school projects to TypePad so they can be shared with others. The transfer from Manila won’t be seamless but you will be able to see the actual student work. And you won’t get the constant message that the site is down. That site was the first one that Tim, my coworker, set up, back in 2002 when we were just beginning to blog. I really liked the features of Manila but it is not the most user friendly software around.
This year, the plan is to model the use of blogs and other web tools for the classroom teacher to demonstate the possiblilities for learning when these are put in the hands of students. The goal is to learn from each other - students, teachers, parents, and others who comment or add to our conversations. I plan to blog the journey and share all I can. I am hoping the classroom teacher will blog along with me so that piece will be available, too. We need more records like that to help us see through the eyes of others. discover what works and what doesn’t.

Also, a couple of students from Georgia State will be doing some student teaching at the school and I will be working again with Lynne Jordan. She’s the one I did the Literature Circles project with. I have transferred those blogs and here is the link. I was going to wait until I got my write-ups done about each project but some of you might like to see those. Check it out here.

Of course today when I was showing Hillary, or should I say, trying I could not get to Flickr or Furl. What blew my mind was what popped up on the screen. I can’t remember exactly but Furl had a message that went something like a social dating ….. and Flickr was something equally crazy. Who blocks these things and how do they make such calls for what they are? I don’t think it will be a problem to get it unblocked, we just have to make a call but it makes me realize how much we have to do to educate others. Sigh…

Anyway, I can’t wait! I still have lots to do to make it all happen but next week I am taking off for a week long vacation at DisneyWorld. We are taking both daughters and their families - five grandchildren in all! We are so pleased that we could get our whole family together for this. We’ll be staying on site and making some memories!!! If I blog at all it will be a photo blog of the vacation!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 4:40 pm and is filed under About Weblogs, Collaborating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.