EduBlog Insights

Head over to  Blogical  Minds to see this post about Educating our legislators!

If you haven’t seen Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s bouncing baby blogger announcement you’re missing out! I had the distinct pleasure of talking to this emerging group this past Monday. I have a strong feeling that some really good things are going to come out of this group. I talked about my experiences blogging with elementary students.  If you are interested, there’s an archive of the session here. Let them hear from you! Head on over to these pre-service teacher blogs and give them a “warm blogging” welcome!

This is such a noteworthy post! Mark Ahlness writes about  SSR - “sustained silent reading” with a 2.0 twist.  He has his kids reading blogs. He has turned them loose on blogs - to read. Mark points out that he will probably not do this every day as there is still value in cuddling up with a book. But he goes on to note that by the time they grow up their reading preferences will be worlds away from where he and his students are now.

This statement by Mark jumped out at me “So much is made of young kids creating content, that I think it’s real easy to overlook the positive aspects of young kids consuming content - created by their peers - and who knows who else?” Mark gives us  much to think about! He is doing some remarkable work with his third greaders.

I need help and I am hoping someone has a solution! All of a sudden my white text has changed to black. The body text is usually white and I didn’t change anything in the body text part of the theme(at least not knowingly). I have gone inside and made changes that I thought were for the body text and experimented with several fixes. Nothing has worked. I have always put it back as it was. I’m wondering if when I have copied and pasted items over from the web if that did it but when I redid that part just using a text file the text on the blog remained black. The text on my blog is correct and white on earlier posts.  Frustration abounds! Any suggestions?

I love this blogging world. Where else can moments like this seem to keep happening? I keep getting blown away by such moments. A couple of weeks ago I found out that since NECC was in Atlanta this year my travel budget was letting me attend another conference. Several searches later I found a conference in San Francisco that fit the bill with what I wanted to learn. I only had a week to make it happen and the fares were out of sight. Yikes! I have some travel funds but they weren’t going to stretch to cover expenses with fares topping out at 5 or 600 dollars. I tried Hotwire for the first time and found an incredible fare through some special offer. You have to book it before you know the schedule but they guaranteed no more than one stop and that you will arrive on the same day. I went for it and lucked out with a non stop out and one stop returning with a fantastic fare of $269 round trip. I took that as an omen that I was meant to go and little did I know what was going to unfold. The conference has been absolutely awesome. I’ll be blogging about it for a while because my schedule has been jammed packed with some of the best sessions I have ever attended. I haven’t had many moments to stop and blog but the blogging will follow over the next few days. I want to share.

Then to top of a spectacular few days this comment arrived on my blog from Ewan McIntosh, one of my most favorite Scottish edubloggers.

My mum’s in SF, too! If you want to hook up send me/her an email . In the meantime I’ll find out where she’s staying and when. I’m sure she’d find it cool to meet up if you’re both around long enough.

Another comment followed:

She’s there from Friday well into next week. Drop a line if you want to meet her up for a drink or a meal - she’s up for it!

Wow! I was up for such an encounter! Ewan’s mum Chris and I have struck up a cyber friendship through our mutual love of teaching and learning. She is my kind of blogger. I love her spirit and think she has a voice that needs to be heard. She connects with my students and really makes a difference through her excellent comments on their blogs.

So Chris and I connected through numerous emails and had a smashing good time last night eating at a great restaurant, the Palomino, right close to the Golden Gate Bridge. (The website doesn’t do this restaurant justice so try it out if you are in San Francisco.

I also got to meet Ewan’s dad John. He’s pretty special too. Chris and I described ourselves to each other and met in the lobby of the Hyatt. You can tell from the pictures how much fun we had. You would have thought we had all known each other for years. We had great conversations ranging from family, to W, to stateside driving, to blogging, to learning, to education, and oh I could go on and on. It was non stop and so much fun. I find it incredible that our paths crossed in San Francisco and that we had the chance to meet up. Chris and John came back to my room so Chris could blog and write some emails. It was sad to part but I can’t help but think that we’ll meet up once again. Meanwhile we’ll keep connecting through the blogging. We took time out for Chris to record a podcast for my kids so I’ll be able to take this special connection back to share with the kids. How cool is that? Take a sneak preview here:Chris.MP3 The kids will hear it on Tuesday. They will love it! Where else but in cyberspace and how else but through blogging could such encounters occur? Good on you Ewan. Now how are you going to top this? Chris coined it as one of these strange flukes of fate that seem to accompany Ewan’s activities, I say bring on some more of those moments Ewan. It was grand!

I couldn’t have picked a better way to kick off a conference than attending David Warlick’s pre-conference session on “Web 2.0: Harnessing the New Shape of Information.” Dave started the session with a creative and engaging twist by having his workshop participants introduce themselves. The twist was that no complete sentences were permitted! Lots of laughter and sharing followed. I was the only blogger in the crowd but I suspect we’ll have more come onboard after he took them on a whirlwind trip through the world of web 2.0. Here is the link to his online handouts.

A few highlights:

• started with parts of Will’s video
• education is about conversation in 21^st century
• landmark-project.com
• handouts.davidwarlick.com
• ‘Coming of Age’ free for download, also a print version, edited by Terry Freeman, proceeds go the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• education is about conversation in 21^st century
• gave history of wiki and how it was created, quick web became wiki wiki web (Hawai word)
• Dave demonstrated creating a wiki all for the audience,
  
• putting an idea out and learning from ensuing discussion
• showed how he posts a blog post, showed dashboard in word press, type in title, text and publish
• iamazing how people are using blogs, in a sense this is a magazine that I publish, no publisher, no editor, publish to a global audience
• it is not about paper and books but about information
• literacy – most of his work is there, literacy has changed,
• teachers get excited about students blogging, it stops being writing but it becomes communicating
• Technorati.com – best place to go and find blogs
• Technorati is to blogging is like what google is to the web
• Wikipedia – knowledge is coming from community, info you could not get elsewhere
• Poster child of web 2.0, content is coming out of conversations
• Answered web 2.0 question here, 1.0 went to get info, 2.o added conversation
• Web 2.0 content is from contributions from conversation
• 1.0 library 2.0 conversation
• skip to good part, you will be on edge of seats, Using an aggregator that makes it easy for him to demonstrate what he is talking about, rss changed everything, Dave Weiner invented it
  
• now we are starting to train the information to find us
• finding best answer to our questions is now much richer, much more exciting
• think del.icio.us - can set up own online bookmark service
• how to get an aggregator, recommends bloglines.com or google.com/reader
• Second life will give you real estate, running a whole virtual second life, it is gaming but people are taking to it, offering free space for educators- per participants
• a podcast is a blog that has a link to an audio file, have a blog, a way of recording, need software like audacity, place to upload audio file so if you have a laptop with a microphone you can podcast for free
• Nneed to redefine literacy, participants did podcasts
• showed how he transferred it and saved it, then opened in audacity
• to get it on internet, he recomments a web podcasting service called podomatic.com, you can log in and go to my podcast, post an episode, type in title, tags, text (show notes) , can add picture, upload audio and you can do the audio right then, can import file, click browse to find audio files and open and post and it uploads it to server
• He uses slapcast.com and it costs 5 dollars a month

Wow! And this is just a few of the highlights. I like his style. It is warm, honest, and he initiates  conversations with his audience. He gave practical items, demonstated a lot, provided humor and got back to all the questions that were asked.It was a great workshop.
He closed with

• We’re not afraid.com

His closing statement ……

“When in history have people like you and I been able to whisper to the world that we are not afraid.”
.

Two of  the kids in the Blogical Minds group have been blogged about and both posts are really going to make a difference to those two student bloggers.

See kids do the darndest things!

and

Dear Mary 

A special thanks to my two good blogging friends, Lani and Jim!

If you want to hear some good podcasts from elementary students who interviewed legislators, Georgia State personnel, and others at a Georgia State Legislative Appreciation night head over to these two students blogs:

On Emmy’s Corner you have:

Interview with Mike Metzler

Interview with Gail Davenport

Interview with Jimmy Pruitt

Interview with Barbara Meyers

And on Jhonny’s News you have:

Interview with Preston Smith

Interview with Nannette Commander

Interview with Roger Bruce

Interview with Jill Chambers

Interview with Jim Flowers

Interview with Allen Freeman

I think these fifth graders did a pretty good job for a first attempt at podcasting and interviewing!

Last night GSU hosted the annual Georgia State University Leadershop Appreciation Night. It is an annual legislative reception to honor and recognize Georgia’s legislators and state officials. The university gets to showcase accomplishments and share priorities with state legislators and officials. The College of Education invited two students from the Blogical Minds group  to represent their group by blogging, asking good questions, recording interviews, and joining in the celebration to spotlight education. Podcasts will be posted a little later on the class blog. You don’t want to miss those. A caricature artist was on hand to add some fun to the occasion. So here’s Emmy….

And here’s Jhonny:

Now here is the instructional technology teacher, the principal. and the classroom teacher. Emmy provided some humor which gave us all a good laugh.  She quipped that’s what happens to technology teachers (on left), that’s how the principal looks in the morning (center photo), and that’s how the classroom teacher looks at the end of the day. (on right). Yep, laughter synthesizes learning. It was a night to be proud of some fine young bloggers! Their voices were heard!

Take a look at the good questions that the blogicians came up with to ask their legislators. Two student bloggers will be attending a legislative event and mix among the group to see which legislators will be willing to be interviewed.